Posted in Whathaveyou on January 10th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
What we have here is a pretty clear case of “oops now you’re a band.” Let’s say you get three or four players together in a jam spot. Everybody’s got their own stuff going on besides — in the case of heavy psychedelic instrumentalist newcomers Kova, it’s reportedly members of Strider, Destroy Earth, Humbaba, Baba Sad, Godbud and Mens Rea, based in Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey — and nobody’s really thinking of adding to that. But then the jam starts, and one hour somehow magically becomes four hours, and at the end of it, it turns out they found something in each other, in the room, in the ether, and/or in the part of the brain where influences are stored and sonic conversation happens. All of a sudden someone starts talking about doing a show. Oops, now you’re a band.
There are various musical entities called Kova in Berlin, South Africa and Brazil, perhaps among others, but the Turkish Kova present their first single in the form of “Firça.” Carved from the initial get together, it’s raw in sound, but not so much as to be unreachable, and it follows an improvisatory course without either losing track of where it wants to go or just repeating the same parts for its entire 10-minute stretch.
So yes, it’s a 10-minute debut single. The appeal there — toward immersion — probably doesn’t need to be pointed out, but there it is anyway. The grit in the two guitars is a presence here, and I’m curious how Kova will proceed in unveiling their work from here, whether “Firça” — also stylized all-caps — is part of an album they will make after editing down more of the session from which this piece comes, or if the first single will standalone as the band look ahead toward booking their next jam.
Did you catch “band” in that sentence? They sure sound like one, anyhow.
From the PR wire:
In April 2024, four friends from Istanbul and Ankara — musicians from various stoner doom and heavy psych bands — came together and recorded a 4-hour, fully improvised session. We loved the results so much that we decided to release the music in parts throughout 2025 and occasionally reunite for live performances.
We’re excited to share our first single, FIRÇA, which will be released on January 10th.
Posted in Reviews on December 12th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Day four of five for this snuck-in-before-the-end-of-the-year Quarterly Review, and I’m left wondering if maybe it won’t be worth booking another week for January or early February, and if that happens, is it still “quarterly” at that point if you do it like six times a year? ‘Bimonthly Quality Control Assessments’ coming soon! Alert your HR supervisors to tell your servers of any allergies.
No, not really.
I’ll figure out a way to sandwich more music into this site if it kills me. Which I guess it might. Whatever, let’s do this thing.
Quarterly Review #31-40
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Sergeant Thunderhoof, The Ghost of Badon Hill
A marked accomplishment in progressive heavy rock, The Ghost of Badon Hill is the fifth full-length from UK five-piece Sergeant Thunderhoof, who even without the element of surprise on their side — which is to say one is right to approach the 45-minute six-tracker with high expectations based on the band’s past work; their last LP was 2022’s This Sceptred Veil(review here) — rally around a folklore-born concept and deliver the to-date album of their career. From the first emergence of heft in “Badon” topped with Daniel Flitcroft soar-prone vocals, Sergeant Thunderhoof — guitarists Mark Sayer and Josh Gallop, bassist Jim Camp and drummer Darren Ashman, and the aforementioned Flitcroft — confidently execute their vision of a melodic riffprog scope. The songs have nuance and character, the narrative feels like it moves through the material, there are memorable hooks and grand atmospheric passages. It is by its very nature not without some indulgent aspects, but also a near-perfect incarnation of what one might ask it to be.
The stated objective of Swallow the Sun‘s Shining was for less misery, and fair enough as the Finnish death-doomers have been at it for about a quarter of a century now and that’s a long time to feel so resoundingly wretched, however relatably one does it. What does less-misery sound like? First of all, still kinda miserable. If you know Swallow the Sun, they are still definitely recognizable in pieces like “Innocence Was Long Forgotten,” “What I Have Become” and “MelancHoly,” but even the frontloading of these singles — don’t worry, from “Kold” and the ultra Type O Negative-style “November Dust” (get it?), to the combination of floating, dancing keyboard lines and drawn out guitars in the final reaches of the title-track, they’re not short on highlights — conveys the modernity brought into focus. Produced by Dan Lancaster (Bring Me the Horizon, A Day to Remember, Muse), the songs are in conversation with the current sphere of metal in a way that Swallow the Sun have never been, broadening the definition of what they do while retaining a focus on craft. They’re professionals.
Trillion Ton Beryllium Ships, The Mind Like Fire Unbound
Where’s the intermittently-crushing sci-fi-concept death-stoner, you ask? Well, friend, Lincoln, Nebraska’s Trillion Ton Beryllium Ships would like to have a word, and on The Mind Like Fire Unbound, there’s a non-zero chance that word will come in the form of layered death metal growls and rasping throatripper screams representing an insectoid species about to tear more-melodically-voiced human colonizers to pieces. The 45-minute LP’s 14-minute opener “BUGS” that lays out this warning is followed by the harsh, cosmic-paranoia conjuration of “Dark Forest” before a pivot in 8:42 centerpiece “Infinite Inertia” — and yes, the structure of the tracks is purposeful; longest at the open and close with shorter pieces on either side of “Infinite Inertia” — takes the emotive cast of Pallbearer to an extrapolated psychedelic metalgaze, huge and broad and lumbering. Of course the contrast is swift in the two-minute “I Hate Space,” but where one expects more bludgeonry, the shortest inclusion stays clean vocally amid its uptempo, Torche-but-not-really push. Organ joins the march in the closing title-track (14:57), which gallops following its extended intro, doom-crashes to a crawl and returns to double-kick behind the encompassing last solo, rounding out with suitable showcase of breadth and intention.
Planet of Zeus make a striking return with their sixth album, Afterlife, basing their theme around mythologies current and past and accompanying that with a sound that’s both less brash than they were a few years back on 2019’s Faith in Physics (review here) and refined in the sharpness and efficiency of its songwriting. It’s a rocker, which is what one has come to expect from these Athens-based veterans. Afterlife builds momentum through desert-style rockers like “Baptized in His Death” and the hooky “No Ordinary Life” and “The Song You Misunderstand,” getting poppish in the stomp of “Bad Milk” only after the bluesy “Let’s Call it Even” and before the punkier “Letter to a Newborn,” going where it wants and leaving no mystery as to how it’s getting there because it doesn’t need to. One of the foremost Greek outfits of their generation, Planet of Zeus show up, tell you what they’re going to do, then do it and get out, still managing to leave behind some atmospheric resonance in “State of Non-Existence.” There’s audible, continued forward growth and kickass tunes. If that sounds pretty ideal, it is.
Cinematic in its portrayal, Le Premier Soleil de Jan Calet positions itself as cosmically minded, and manifests that in sometimes-minimal — effectively so, since it’s hypnotic — aural spaciousness, but Paris’ Human Teorema veer into Eastern-influenced scales amid their exploratory, otherworldly-on-purpose landscaping, and each planet on which they touch down, from “Onirico” (7:43) to “Studiis” (15:54) and “Spedizione” (23:20) is weirder than the last, shifting between these vast passages and jammier stretches still laced with synth. Each piece has its own procession and dynamic, and perhaps the shifts in intent are most prevalent within “Studiis,” but the closer is, on the balance, a banger as well, and there’s no interruption in flow once you’ve made the initial choice to go with Le Premier Soleil de Jan Calet. An instrumental approach allows Human Teorema to embody descriptive impressions that words couldn’t create, and when they decide to hit it hard, they’re heavy enough for the scale they’ve set. Won’t resonate universally (what does?), but worth meeting on its level.
There are two epics north of the 10-minute mark on Caged Wolves‘ maybe-debut LP, A Deserts Tale: “Lost in the Desert” (11:26) right after the intro “Dusk” and “Chaac” (10:46) right before the hopeful outro “Dawn.” The album runs a densely-packed 48 minutes through eight tracks total, and pieces like the distortion-drone-backed “Call of the Void,” the alt-prog rocking “Eleutheromania,” “Laguna,” which is like earlier Radiohead in that it goes somewhere on a linear build, and the spoken-word-over-noise interlude “The Lost Tale” aren’t exactly wanting for proportion, regardless of runtime. The bassline that opens “Call of the Void” alone would be enough to scatter orcs, but that still pales next to “Chaac,” which pushes further and deeper, topping with atmospheric screams and managing nonetheless to come out of the other side of that harsh payoff of some of the album’s most weighted slog in order to bookend and give the song the finish it deserves, completing it where many wouldn’t have been so thoughtful. This impression is writ large throughout and stands among the clearest cases for A Deserts Tale as the beginning of a longer-term development.
I find myself wanting to talk about how big Liminal Escapism sounds, but I don’t mean in terms of tonal proportion so much as the distances that seem to be encompassed by Greek progressive instrumentalists Anomalos Kosmos. With an influence from Grails and, let’s say, 50 years’ worth of prog rock composition (but definitely honoring the earlier end of that timeline), Anomalos Kosmos offer emotional evocation in pieces that feel compact on either side of six or seven minutes, taking the root jams and building them into structures that still come across as a journey. The classy soloing in “Me Orizeis” and synthy shimmer of “Parapatao,” the rumble beneath the crescendo of “Kitonas” and all of that gosh darn flow in “Flow” speak to a songwriting process that is aware of its audience but feels no need to talk down, musically speaking, to feed notions of accessibility. Instead, the immersion and energetic drumming of “Teledos” and the way closer “Cigu” rallies around pastoral fuzz invite the listener to come along on this apparently lightspeed voyage — thankfully not tempo-wise — and allow room for the person hearing these sounds to cast their own interpretations thereof.
One could not hope to fully encapsulate an impression here of nearly three and a half hours of sometimes-improv psych-drone, and I refuse to feel bad for not trying. Instead, I’ll tell you that Grand Fractal Orchestra — the Psychedelic Source Records 3CD edition of which has already sold out — finds Budapest-based guitarist Ákos Karancz deeply engaged in the unfolding sounds here. Layering effects, collaborating with others from the informal PSR collective like zitherist Márton Havlik or singer Krisztina Benus, and so on, Karancz constructs each piece in a way that feels both steered in a direction and organic to where the music wants to go. “Ore Genesis” gets a little frantic around the middle but finds its chill, “Human Habitat” is duly foreboding, and the two-part, 49-minute-total capper “Transforming Time to Space” is beautiful and meditative, like staring at a fountain with your ears. It goes without saying not everybody has the time or the attention span to sit with a release like this, but if you take it one track at a time for the next four years or so, there’s worlds enough in these songs that they’ll probably just keep sinking in. And if Karancz puts outs like five new albums in that time too, so much the better.
It probably goes without saying — at least it should — that while the classic folk fingerplucking of “Whispering Waters” and the Americana-busy “Laurel Creek Blues” give a sweet introduction to Blake Hornsby‘s A Village of Many Springs, inevitably it’s the 23-minute experimentalist spread of the finale, “Bury My Soul in the Linville River,” that’s going to be a focal point for many listeners, and fair enough. The earthbound-cosmic feel of that piece, its devolution into Lennon-circa-1968 tape noise and concluding drone, aren’t at all without preface. A Village of Many Springs gets weirder as it goes, with the eight-minute “Cathedral Falls” building over its time into a payoff of seemingly on-guitar violence, and the subsequent “O How the Water Flows” nestling into a sweet spot between Appalachian nostalgia and foreboding twang. There’s percussion and manipulation of noise later, too, but even in its repetition, “O How the Water Flows” continues Hornsby‘s trajectory. For what’s apparently an ode to water in the region surrounding Hornsby‘s home in Asheville, North Carolina, that it feels fluid should be no surprise, but by no means does one need to have visited Laurel Creek to appreciate the blues Hornsby conjures for them.
With a sensibility in some of the synth of “Hacamat” born of space rock, Congulus have no trouble moving from that to the 1990s-style alt-rock saunter of “Diri Bir Nefes,” furthering the momentum already on the Istanbul-based instrumentalist trio’s side after opener “İskeletin Düğün Halayı” before “Senin Sırlarının Yenilmez Gücünü Gördüm” spaces out its solo over scales out of Turkish folk and “Park” marries together the divergent chugs of Judas Priest and Meshuggah, there’s plenty of adventure to be had on Göçebe. It’s the band’s second full-length behind 2019’s Bozkır — they’ve had short releases between — and it moves from “Park” into the push of “Zarzaram” and “Vordonisi” with efficiency that’s only deceptive because there’s so much stylistic range, letting “Ulak” have its open sway and still bash away for a moment or two before “Sonunda Ah Çekeriz Derinden” closes by tying space rock, Mediterranean traditionalism and modern boogie together in one last jam before consigning the listener back to the harsher, decidedly less utopian vibes of reality.
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 1st, 2023 by JJ Koczan
One imagines that, circa 30 years ago, there were older heads hanging around getting a big kick out of kids in Led Zeppelin shirts the way the youth now emblazon Nirvana logos as a sign of culture. Not arguing at all. It’s friggin’ awesome. Hailing from Ankara in Turkey, heavy rocking five-piece Strider — who released their debut album, Midnight Zen (review here), earlier this year have taken on the Seattle legends’ “All Apologies.” Originally from 1993’s In Utero, it was of course the band who broke grunge huge’s final LP before guitarist/vocalist Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994.
I can still hear the original version without hearing it, and Strider are both loyal to the blueprint laid out and bringing something of themselves to the track tonally and melodically while also tripping out the end in a way that feels organic and creative. I wouldn’t ask anything else of such a cover. Strider‘s version appears on Rather Be Dead Than Cool, a tribute LP from Turkish imprint Mevzu Records.
The song is streaming below, and under that, you’ll find the album player too, just in case you’re up for a revisit. If you didn’t catch it the first time around, I doubt you’ll regret doing so now.
Text mostly from Bandcamp:
In January of 2023, Mevzu Records (a renown Underground Turkish Record Label) invited Strider to cover a Nirvana Song for a Tribute Album.
We immediately resonated with the In Utero song All Apologies, thinking that it might be a good fit for the band.
We decided to get in the studio, record it live and get out. The outcome was this waveform, somber yet familiar, a ‘’corny Nirvana cover song’’ which speaks to us, tells our story.
This track is part of a tribute album ” Rather Be Dead Than Cool ” by Mevzu Records.
Posted in Reviews on January 31st, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Ankara, Turkey’s Strider make their full-length debut with the self-released Midnight Zen, and quite a debut it is. With the Kyuss-but-not-only-Kyuss-inspired “Hive” at the outset, the live-recording five-piece put themselves in the sphere of contemporary European-style heavy, perhaps taking influence from some of the many acts in neighboring Greece in addition to the classics of the form. One way or the other, they swing in “Hive” and shove in such a way as to put them in league with the likes of Valley of the Sun, an expansive production aiding them from the start in creating a sense of atmosphere to go along with the inherent range of their material, which starts raucous but isn’t necessarily limited to throwing elbows.
Fronted by Atılım Karaca, whose from-the-gut voice-push on the opener will be a familiar enough method to genre heads but who, like the band generally, isn’t limited to one approach, with Selçuk Çelebi and Yiğit Çiçek on guitar, Sertuğ Kostik on bass and Mertcan Kabaş on drums, the album — cover by Yağız Eyiişleyen — was tracked with Bora Özkum (who also mixed) at Mirage Studios in Ankara, co-produced by the band, and mastered by Memet İncili for a sound that is sharp but full and able to pull the listener into the momentum that “Hive” creates even as the subsequent “Bystander Apathy” immediately expands outward from the foundation the lead cut sets.
It does so by slowing the tempo a bit, pulling back on the vocal oomph and riding a twisting groove in the chorus on its way with deceptive patience for all the surrounding crash to a fuzzy bridge and a later airy solo section that more than hints at the crux of Midnight Zen itself, which lies in the band’s ability to pull together melodic songcraft, jammy breadth, and hard-hitting distorted rhythm. In its momentary break before it enters its seventh minute, “Bystander Apathy” is suitably melancholic, but it soon surges forward to end in its final minute on a chugging largesse worthy of its movement to that point.
On its face, Midnight Zen moves back and forth between shorter and longer cuts, and the tracklist pattern reads as follows:
1. Hive (3:51)
2. Bystander Apathy (8:16)
3. Dream With the Dreamer (5:26)
4. Midnight Zen (10:26)
5. Molly the Holy (6:07)
This obviously puts the 10-minute song that shares the album’s name as a focal point — they named the record Midnight Zen, so fair enough — but each piece of the whole serves a function to add something and deepen the listening experience, as with the semi-psychedelic noodling early in “Dream With the Dreamer,” which seems conscious of where it’s heading even as it holds back the weighted surge until it’s almost halfway through, patiently building in the drums and bass while the guitars set themselves on a more willfully meandering path before the fuzz pedals are stomped and the track coalesces around festival-worthy soloing and a memorable nod of a hook before they crash to a feedback finish.
As the centerpiece, “Dream With the Dreamer” moves the journey of the album deeper along its course, the band’s fluidity coming to the forefront whether it’s in the quieter or the louder half of the song, with Karaca‘s voice malleable to what’s called for in the moment. “Bystander Apathy” certainly has its heavier stretches and subtly angular procession, and “Dream With the Dreamer” affirms that the plotted feel there is no fluke.
In the second half payoff, the guitars resolve in a kind of jet-engine-takeoff repetitive buzz, but the full wash of distortion and cymbal crash makes for an even richer affect as they move toward that extended ringout finish, fading to the silence that serves as a direct-feeling — though on vinyl that’s invariably where the sides would split — transition into “Midnight Zen” itself, which maybe dips into Mediterranean folk in its early guitar leads as the song fades in like sunrise before picking up where that jet engine in “Dream With the Dreamer” left off, a largesse of riff very much bolstered by the bass as the initial verse unfolds smoothly.
Either one or both guitars gets a solo in the midsection, and the title-track shifts toward the instrumental to begin its back half, breaking from the triumphant shred to a stretch of pastoral noodling that calls back to the song while working in quiet and echoing vocals before locking into the denser nod of the payoff, having already hit its last crash before residual feedback carries it across the 10-minute mark and toward the finale “Molly the Holy,” which is executed as something of a summary of what Strider have done thus far, pulling together the atmospheric sections and the hints of Elder-style prog-heavy with a more straight-ahead heavy desert fuzz tonality, harnessing a three-dimensional mix to create and then fill a space with its own volume.
“Molly the Holy” does this by following the pattern of starting mellow and then kicking in heavy (at 1:40, if you’re looking for it), but the purposefully nodding tempo gives a grandeur to the procession, and the cavernous floating melody of the vocals matches well. They transition somewhat suddenly into a quieter verse, bass holding steady while even the drums settle down momentarily to punctuate the notes of guitar, and by the time they come back around to what will be Midnight Zen‘s capper heavy section, they’re in a full-on lumber.
Though as it moves past its fifth minute there’s tremolo guitar and a sense of end-of-set big finish in progress, the band remain admirably unhurried in their delivery, refusing to give into the temptation to blast out their ending and undercut the work they’ve done establishing an ambience across the record as an entirety. This is part of the accomplishment of Midnight Zen, but only part. The fullness of the production and the clear intent on the part of Strider to enter into the conversation of modern European heavy is writ throughout that last roll and the album more generally, and their potential to do just that is palpable in these songs.
It’s not that they don’t have growing to do, but that they’ve clearly already put time into developing their sound since their 2018 debut EP, Ironiea, was released, and they come across like they’ll continue to move forward in progressive fashion. Thinking about that hopeful future makes Midnight Zen an even more exciting listen, but whatever they may build on top of the accomplishments here going forward, those same accomplishments are worth appreciating right now.
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 7th, 2016 by JJ Koczan
German heavy psych rockers Wight released their funk-fortified third album (I kind of wish it was their fourth, just so I could continue the alliteration), Love is Not Only What You Know (review here), in September on Fat and Holy Records, Kozmik Artifactz, etc. Like everything they’ve done to-date, it represented a significant turn in sound from where they’d been previously, taking some of the psychedelic elements of 2012’s sophomore outing, Through the Woods into Deep Water (review here), to upbeat places that many even in the jammiest spheres wouldn’t dare to go. Adding a fourth member in percussionist/vocalist Steffen Kirchpfening, Wight signaled clearly they were embarking on a new era, and if you heard the record — if you haven’t, stream it below — you know the results were righteous.
Now they’ll take the show on the road in Germany and Switzerland. Joined by Kes from Istanbul, Wight head into 2017 in grand style on a run presented by Sound of Liberation that starts on Dec. 27 and goes until Jan. 7. They seem to have given the tour the name “The Green Baron and the Flying Fist of Bosphorus,” so, you know, that’s something. I have no idea what it means, but it sounds like a good time, and that could very well be the point.
Dates follow as announced by the band via the social medias:
We are happy to announce the upcoming Germany/Switzerland tour between the years with KES from Istanbul as support. You might have never heard of them but now it’s time. We are also working on new songs to present you at one of the following dates:
Wight & Kes, The Green Baron and the Flying Fist of Bosphorous tour: 27.12 MICHELSTADT – Unterholz 28.12 MÜNCHEN – Feierwerk 29.12 WÜRZBURG – Immerhin 30.12 OLTEN – Coq D’or 31.12 DARMSTADT – Goldene Krone 03.01 HAMBURG – Bar227 04.01 KIEL – Schaubude 05.01 DRESDEN – Sabotage 06.01 BERLIN – Zukunft am Ostkreuz 07.01 TBA please get in contact with us for booking!
Poster by Maarten Donders and René Hofmann
Wight is: René Hofmann – Guitar, Vocals, Synthesizer Peter-Philipp Schierhorn – Bass, Additional Vocals Thomas Kurek – Drums, Additional Vocals Steffen Kirchpfening – Percussion, Additional Vocals
