In the annals of scorcher jams, there are few who burn like Tia Carrera burn. The Austin, Texas, trio are 20 years removed from their debut album, The November Session, and five from their latest, 2020’s Tried and True (review here), and I suppose their 2011 fourth LP, Cosmic Priestess (review here), is as choice a place to start as any with the band, but it’s not like 2019’s Visitors/Early Purple (review here) or 2009’s Small Stone label debut, The Quintessential (review here), don’t hold up. Rest assured, Tia Carrera have been kicking ass all the while. In addition to the righteous Alexander Von Wieding cover art and the Fender Rhodes added to “Sand, Stone and Pearl” with a guest spot by Ezra Reynolds, I guess Cosmic Priestess serves as an example of the band at their best, because that seems to be what you get every time they show up.

There are four pieces on Cosmic Priestess: “Slave Cylinder” (7:34), “Sand, Stone and Pearl” (15:11), “Saturn Missile Battery” (33:41) and “A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing” (8:00). The three-piece of guitarist Jason Morales (also bass), bassist Jamey Simms (also guitar) and drummer Erik Conn reportedly showed up, Morales hit record on a tape machine, and they fired away at making the album in completely improvised fashion. That is, they hit it and the fuzzy glories Morales nails over the Conn‘s backbeat just happened to be what came out of the moment. Even for a band who base what they do around notions of improv jamming — that is, even on the scale of heavy jams more broadly — the results are strikingly rad.

By the time they’re two minutes into “Slave Cylinder,” the listener should be able to see where this is going. The crux is immersion wrought not through effects-laced meandering (nothing against that), but barnburner soloing, malleable-on-the-spot tempos and purposeful twists when the time comes. With more of a languid pace and the aforementioned Rhodes inclusion — which makes a big difference arrangement-wise when the rest of what pervades is kept to live-recorded guitar, bass and drums — “Sand, Stone and Pearl” is a defining feature for Cosmic Priestess, perhaps even more than the half-hour-long “Saturn Missile Battery,” coming off the lay-waste shred of “Slave Cylinder” with a movement distinct in purpose as the guitar and guesting keys work off each other in complementary fashion. Tia Carrera, by virtue of the nature of their basic approach, are far more about exploration than hookmaking generally. In “Sand, Stone and Pearl,” they find a way to play to both sides.

The intention behind “Saturn Missile Battery” — can you call it intention for something improvised? Yeah, I think you can. I mean, the material has been mixed. It’s presumably been carved out of a larger batch of jams that took place at Morales‘ home studio that day or days, or however long it was ultimately, and that means that even for something as massive and sprawling as “Saturn Missile Battery”‘s 33 minutes, there’s an element of conscious presentation at work. It’s not like, oops, Tia Carrera just busted out this killer succession of movements carrying the listener from one end of the thing to the next with both trance and physicality happening in the music all the while, a rough spot or two left in both for authenticity because, really, screw it, and parts explored to a full life cycle in real-time as Conn, Simms and Morales chart the path at the same time they’re walking it.

None of this would be possible without chemistry between the band members. The way “Saturn Missile Battery” unfolds and develops over its time, with subtle changes as they go until, about 20 minutes in, when the guitars drop out as Conn holds the drums to the tension they’re creating and the whole band bring the song to and through a blowout crescendo followed by a lower-key comedown, bluesy in its strut for a while there, but still moving back toward scorch as they fade it out. I don’t know if any part of it was thought of beforehand or not, but it is the peak of immersion on Cosmic Priestess, and rightly placed for being as far out as Tia Carrera go, with the lead-in of the first two tracks letting you arrive at the precipice you’re soon to leap from.

Something like that shows that even 14 years ago, Tia Carrera were cognizant of building an album rather than just throwing together improvised sections of jams and seeing what sticks, though invariably finding ‘what sticks’ is part of that process as well, in the recording, in the mixing and in the finished product of a record itself. They come back around to cap with “A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing” a bluesier, looser progression than “Saturn Missile Battery” but fluid and self-contained from start to end, sort of mirroring the way “Slave Cylinder” felt like they were working their way deeper toward “Sand, Stone and Pearl” and “Saturn Missile Battery,” except this time it’s “A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing” leading the listener gradually back toward the reality waiting on the other side of its last crashout.

Tia Carrera went to Europe in 2022 and have featured at two of the last three Ripplefest Texases, and of course being based in Austin are veterans of SXSW, etc. They also did Monolith on the Mesa in 2019 and I don’t even know how many others along the way because they’ve been around for at least 22 years and have always been focused on playing live, even if they’re not out for eight months at a clip doing it. I suppose they’re something of a well-kept secret in instrumental heavy, but their commitment to improv — as opposed to a band like Earthless, who wind up with a not dissimilar style and continually emphasize the songs are written before they’re recorded — remains a distinguishing factor and makes their studio efforts all the more precious. Since at least 2019, they’ve at Curt Christenson (Dixie Witch) on bass, and I guess the bottom line is that anytime they want to go ahead and super-casual hit record and belt out another hour or so of on-an-adventure bangers, I’m here for it. Yes, that ‘deep critical insight’ — duh, band good; I like it — is how I’m ending this. It also was improvised.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

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Next week is part planned out, but I’ve got a long way to go before I get there. Tonight’s Halloween, so we’ve gotta go trick-or-treating with the group of parents from Girl Scouts. I think they’re bringing drinks? Like they’re gonna be doing shots while their kids run in the road. I’ll be the responsible one, stoned instead.

But that’ll suck. And tomorrow we’re going north to Connecticut for my niece’s birthday. That won’t be awful, but is never not a lot when we sleep over up there. Plus where we stay isn’t winterized, so it’s gonna get cold at night. I expect Pecan complaints to abound, basically until it’s time to go and then she doesn’t want to leave.

Records I’m buying for my niece, turning 17: Pretty Hate Machine, the self-titled Alice in Chains, I was thinking maybe some Sabbath or Graveyard’s Hisingen Blues, but I’d also like to get her a Chelsea Wolfe record or Emma Ruth Rundle, so it depends on what’s at the shop as well when I go, which I’ll do this afternoon between going to the school to give The Pecan lunch and going back to the school like an hour and a half later for the Halloween parade, which also will suck. Pretty much anything where I have to stand around and/or talk to other, way more normal, parents, is what when it applies to the kid we call ‘less preferred.’ For me it feels a lot like torture.

But it will end. And Sunday we’ll come home and have a quiet day before… wait for it… three days off from school next week. So this week was three half-days, and next week is three no-days. I am keeping my writing schedule flexible accordingly. I will do what I can when I can.

Zelda update: I have one dungeon left in Twilight Princess. I found a mod that lets me duplicate items oldschool-cheat-code style in Tears of the Kingdom and have been having fun breaking rules in that the last couple days, as well as upgrading armor, which is why I got it, so that when I put the Depths of the Kingdom mod on in the next whenever, there’s enough defense hopefully to withstand the barrage of enemies thrown at you. I’ve enjoyed Twilight Princess as well, and I’m not in a rush to be done with it, but I think between the two I prefer Wind Waker. They’re both chock full of Zelda stuff, and they have a lot of similar mechanics, but the brighter look is so much more where my head is at now. I don’t need realism. I need cartoons, I guess. That said, I was thinking I might do Ocarina of Time on the Switch 2 next, though now I also have my original N64 and that cartridge with my original game still on it, so maybe I’ll just play with that a bit instead. I’ll see when I get there. Livestream schedule coming soon.

Have a great and safe weekend. I’m gonna go shower and get ready for the rest of today. If you do the Halloween thing, be safe. If you don’t, I’m right there with you.

FRM.

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Austin jammers Tia Carrera were probably a little ahead of their time when they got going and started playing happy hours and pressing CDRs in the middle of the last decade, but certainly by the time they got around to releasing Cosmic Priestess (review here) in 2011, an improv-based heavy psych jam unit wasn’t unheard of. Yet their name is rarely in the conversation when it comes to this kind of psychedelia. That might be in part because they don’t really tour, but I think it has something to do with how much of a standout they are even in their hometown, which boasts plenty of heavy rock and plenty of jamming, but very little crossover. Veterans of course of SXSW, the trio has also jammed out at Roadburn and everything they recorded for Cosmic Priestess — which was their second offering through Small Stone after 2009’s The Quintessential (review here) — was improvised and recorded live to 1″ tape in 2010 with the lineup of guitarist Jason Morales, bassist Jamey Simms and drummer Erik Conn.

The sum total of the four tracks on the CD version of the album stood at 64 minutes, and to this day, the CD version of Cosmic Priestess is a considerable undertaking. Even if you’re just going to put it on to trip out to the echo and wah and lose yourself in whichever of the four extended jams, it’s a commitment in time and attention. They could’ve probably released the 33-minute “Saturn Missile Battery,” which was mixed by the band with Mark Deutrom (ex-the Melvins), on its own as a full-length and no one would’ve blinked, but the ambition in Tia Carrera‘s improvisational project finds its mirror in the amount of output they have to show for it, which of course is more than a single 12″ LP can hold.

Small Stone has pressed Cosmic Priestess to a 12″ platter, however — 250 copies on black wax and 250 in a yellow record with black and red swirl, both on 180 gram vinyl in a gatefold package that highlights the oh-hell-yessery of Alexander von Wieding‘s turn-it-sideways cover art — and the solution for making it fit has been to edit the songs. CD closer “A Wolf in Wolf’s Clothing” is out entirely, while opener “Slave Cylinder” remains untouched at 7:32. The real difference comes in middle pieces “Sand, Stone and Pearl,” which is 15:10 on disc and 11:40 on vinyl, and “Saturn Missile Battery,” taken from 33:40 to 20:48. Both still give plenty of time for Tia Carrera to make their point, of course, but it’s a change in how the album itself is presented, with “Saturn Missile Battery” occupying all of side B while side A has two relatively neat jams that run roughly the same amount of time. It changes the structure of the album, and I don’t think it’s for the worse.

It’s a hard thing to say you’re in favor of editing a band’s output, and I’m not going to say I am, only that Cosmic Priestess sounds really fucking good on vinyl, and if trimming off some of the material was how that happened, then it’s a fair enough trade from a listening standpoint. I put headphones on and was immediately sucked into the unfolding course of “Slave Cylinder,” and Conn‘s drumming on “Saturn Missile Battery” came across as all the more righteous, the subtle hiss of my record player adding complement to the band’s analog worship and classic heavy sensibilities. They’re still jamming the living hell out of the tracks, and while the LP edition of the album is shorter, the trade there is it’s also more accessible. By the time side B comes to its finish, I want Tia Carrera to keep going, and that’s just how it should be.

To the best of my knowledge, the three-piece hasn’t done anything in the studio since Cosmic Priestess, and members have other projects going, but they’ll still play shows in and around Austin every now and again. In light of the emergence of a more jam-minded heavy psychedelia over the last couple years, both in the US and in Europe, it would be interesting to see how a new Tia Carrera album fared upon release. Whether or not that’ll happen, I don’t know, but Cosmic Priestess has easily proved worth a vinyl revisit.

Tia Carrera, Cosmic Priestess (2011)

Tia Carrera on Thee Facebooks

Small Stone Records