Quarterly Review: Negative Reaction, Fuzz Evil, Cardinal Point, Vlimmer, No Gods No Masters, Ananda Mida, Ojo Malo, Druid Fluids, Gibbous Moon, Mother Magnetic
Posted in Reviews on November 27th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Don’t ask me if the ‘quarter’ in question is Fall or Winter, and I’m still planning another QR probably in early January or even December if I can sneak it, but I was able to sneak this week in while no one was looking at the calendar — mostly, that is, while I wasn’t filling said calendar with other stuff — and I decided to make it happen. I even used the ol’ Bing AI to make a header image for it. I was tired of all the no-color etchings. It’s been a decade of that at this point. I’ll try this for a bit and see how I feel about it. The kind of thing that matters pretty much only to me.
This might go to 70, but for right now it’s 50 releases Monday to Friday starting today, 10 per day. I know the drill. You know the drill. Let’s get it going.
Quarterly Review #1-10:
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Negative Reaction, Zero Minus Infinity
Holy fucking shit this rips. You want sludge? Call the masters. There are two generations of bands out there right now trying to tap into the kind of slow and ultra-heavy disaffection — not to mention the guitar tone — of Negative Reaction, and yet, no hype whatsoever. This record didn’t come to me from some high-level public relations concern. It came from Kenny Bones, who founded Negative Reaction over 30 years ago in Long Island (he and thus the band are based in West Virginia now) and whose perpetual themes between crushing depression and the odd bit of Star Wars-franchised space opera have rarely sounded more intentionally grueling. Across six songs and a mood-altering 46 minutes, Bones, bassist KJ and drummer Brian Alien bludgeon with rawness and volume-worship weight that, frankly, is the kind of thing riff-dudes on social media should be tripping over themselves to be first to sing its praises, the lurch in “Back From the Sands” feeling sincere in its unconscious rifference (that’s a reference you make with a riff) to Saint Vitus‘ “Born Too Late,” and maybe Negative Reaction were, or maybe they were born too early, or whatever, but it’s not like they’ve been a fit at any point in the last 30-plus years — cheeky horror riff chugging in “Space Hunter,” all-out fuckall-punker blast in “I’ll Have Another” before the 13-minute flute-laced (yes, Bones is on it) cosmic doom finish of “Welcome to Infinity,” etc., reaffirming square-peg status — because while there’s an awful lot of sludge out there, there’s only ever been one Negative Reaction. Bones‘ and company’s angry adventures, righteous and dense in sound, continue unabated.
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Fuzz Evil, New Blood
Arizona brothers Wayne and Joey Rudell return with New Blood, the first Fuzz Evil full-length since High on You (review here) in 2018, and make up for lost time with 53 minutes of new material across 13 songs from the post-Queens of the Stone Age rock at the outset in “Suit Coffin” to the slow, almost Peter Gabriel-style progressivism of “Littlest Nemo,” the nighttime balladry of “Gullible’s Travel” or the disco groove of “Keep on Living.” Those three are tucked at the end, but Fuzz Evil telegraph new ideas and departures early in “My Own Blood” and even the speedier “Run Away,” with its hints of metal, pulls to the side from “Souveneers,” the hooky “G.U.M.O.C.O.,” a cut like “Heavy Glow” (premiered here) finding some middle ground between attitude-laced desert rock and the expansions thereupon of some New Blood‘s tracks. Shout to “We’ve Seen it All” as the hidden gem. All Fuzz Evil have ever wanted is to write songs and maybe make someone — perhaps even you — dance at a show. With the obvious sweat and soul put into New Blood, a little boogieing doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
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Cardinal Point, Man or Island
A second full-length from Serbia’s Cardinal Point, Man or Island asks its central question — are you a man or an island — in the leadoff title-track. I’m not sure what being one or the other delineates, but masculinity would seem to be preferred judging by the Down-style riffing of “Stray Dog” or the heavy-like-1991 “Right ‘n’ Ready,” which feels like it was written for the stage, whether or not it actually was. “Sunrise” borders on hard country with its uber-dudeliness, but closer “This Chest” offers tighter-twisting, Lo-Pan-style riffing to cap. The tracks are pointedly straightforward, making no pretense about where the band is coming from or what they want to be doing as players. The grooves swing big and the choruses are delivered with force. You wouldn’t call it groundbreaking, but the Vranje-based four-piece aren’t trying to revolutionize heavy so much as to speak to various among those traditions that birthed it. They succeed in that here, and in making the results their own.
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Vlimmer, Zerschöpfung
Voices far more expert than mine have given pinpointed analyses of Vlimmer‘s goth-as-emotive-vehicle, semi-electronic, sometimes-heavy post-punk, New Dark Wave, etc., stylistic reach as relates to the Berlin-based solo artist’s latest full-length, Zerschöpfung, but hearing The Cure in “Makks” and “Fatalideal” taken to a place of progressive extrapolation on “Platzwort” and to hear the Author & Punisher-informed slow industrial churn of the penultimate “Todesangst” become the backdrop for a dreamy vocal like Tears for Fears if they stayed up all night scribbling in their notebook because they had so much to say. Vlimmer (né Alexander Leonard Donat) has had a productive run since the first numbered EPs started showing up circa 2015, and Zerschöpfung feels like a summation of the style he’s established as his own, able to speak to various sides of underground and outsider musics without either losing itself in the emotionalism of the songs or sublimating identity to genre.
Blackjack Illuminist Records on Bandcamp
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No Gods No Masters, Torment
Dutch sludge metallers No Gods No Masters may seem monolithic at first on their second full-length, the self-released Torment, but the post-metallic dynamics in the atmospheric guitar on lead cut “Into Exile” puts the lie to the supposition. Not that there isn’t plenty of extreme crush to go around in “Into Exile” and the four songs that follow — second track “Towering Waves” and closer “End” on either side of the 10-minute mark, “Such Vim and Vigor” and “A God Among the Waste” shorter like “Into Exile” in a five-to-six-minute range — as the band move from crawling ambience to consuming, scream-topped ultra-doom, leave bruises with elbows thrown before the big slowdown in “Such Vim and Vigor” and tear ass regardless of tempo through the finale, and while they never quite let go of the extremity of their purpose, neither do they forget that their purpose is more than extremity. Torment sounds punishing superficially — certainly the title gives a hint that all is not sunshine and puppies — but a deeper listen is met by the richness of No Gods No Masters‘ approach.
No Gods No Masters on Facebook
No Gods No Masters on Bandcamp
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Ananda Mida, Reconciler
Italian psych rockers Ananda Mida are joined by a host of guests throughout their third full-length, Reconciler, including a return appearance from German singer-songwriter Conny Ochs on the extended heavy psych blueser “Swamp Thing” (14:52) and the four-part finale “Doom and the Medicine Man (Pt. V-VIII)” (22:09), which draws a thread through the history of prog and acid rocks, kraut and space applying no less to the 12-minute “Lucifer’s Wind” as to the surf-riffing “Reconciling” after — the latter gets a reprise on platter two of the 83-minute 2LP — as Ananda Mida dig deep into the shining thrust in the early verses of “Never Surrender” that give over to thoughtful jamming in the song’s second half, finding proto-metallic resolve in “Following the Light” before reconciling “Reconciling (Reprise)” and unfurling “Doom and the Medicine Man” like the lost ’70s coke-rock epic it may well be in some other universe, complete with the acoustic postscript. It’s two records’ worth of ambitious, and it’s two records’ worth of record. This is exploratory on a stylistic level. Searching.
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Ojo Malo, Black Light Fever Tripping
Lumbering out of El Paso, Texas (where folks know what salsa should taste like), with seven tracks across a 23-minute debut EP, Ojo Malo follow a Sabbathian course of harder-edged doom, thick in its groove through “Crow Man” after the “Intro” and speedier with an almost nu-metal crunch in “Charon the Ferryman.” There’s Clutch and C.O.C. influences in the riffing, but there are tougher elements too, a tension that wouldn’t have been out of place 28 years ago on a Prong record, and the swing in “Black Trip Lord” has an undercurrent of aggression that comes forward in its chugging second half. The penultimate “Grim Greefo Rising” offers more in terms of melody after its riffy buildup, and “Executioner” reveals the Judas Priest that’s been in the band’s collective heart all the while. Bookended with manipulated sounds from the recordings in “Intro” and “Outro,” Black Light Fever Tripping sounds exactly like it doesn’t have time for your bullshit so get your gear off stage now and don’t break down your cymbals up there or it’s fucking on.
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Druid Fluids, Then, Now, Again & Again
Druid Fluids — aka Adelaide, Australia’s Jamie Andrew, plus a few friends on drums, piano, and so on — inhabits a few different personae out of psychedelic historalia throughout Then, Now, Again & Again, finding favorites in The Beatles in “Flutter By,” “Into Me I See” (both with sitar), and “Layers” while peopling other songs specifically with elements drawn from David Bowie and the solo work of Lennon and McCartney, all of which feels like fair game for the meticulously-arranged 11-song collection. “Sour’s Happy Fantasy” offers sci-fi fuzz grandeur, while “Timeline” is otherworldly in all but the central strum holding it to the ground — a singularly satisfying melody — and “Out of Phase” swaggers in like Andrew knows he was born in the wrong time. He might’ve been, but he seems to have past, present and future covered either way in this material, some of which was reportedly written when he was a teenager but which has no doubt grown more expansive in the intervening years.
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Gibbous Moon, Saturn V
The years between their 2017 self-titled three-songer EP and the forthcoming 11-track debut full-length, Saturn V, would seem to have found Philly heavy rockers Gibbous Moon refining their approach in terms of craft and process. “Blue Shelby” has a turn on guitar like Dire Straits as vocalist Noelle Felipe (also bass) drops references to Scarface in “Blue Shelby” and brings due classicism to Mauro Felipe‘s guitar on “Ayadda.” That song, as well as “Everything” and closer “Peacemaker,” tie the EP to the LP, but Noelle, Mauro and drummer Michael Mosley are unquestionably more confident in their delivery, whether it’s the bass in the open reaches of “Sine Wave” or the of-course-it’s-speed-rock “Follow that Car” and its punker counterpart “Armadillo.” Space rock is a factor in “Indivisible,” and “Inflamed” is almost rockabilly in its tense verse, but wherever Gibbous Moon go, their steps are as sure as the material itself is solid. I’m not sure when this is actually out, if it’s 2023 or 2024, but heads up on it.
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Mother Magnetic, Mother Magnetic
Arranged shortest to longest between the ah-oo-oo-ah-ah hookiness of “Sucker’s Disease” (3:03), the nodder rollout of “Daughters of the Sun” (5:47) and the reach into psych-blues jamming in “Goddess Land” (7:03), Mother Magnetic‘s self-titled three-song EP is the first public offering from the Brisbane four-piece of vocalist Rox, guitarist James, bassist Tim and drummer Danny, and right into the later reaches of the last of those tracks, the band’s intentions feel strongly declarative in establishing their melodic reach, an Iommi-circa-’81 take on riffmaking, and a classic boozy swagger to the vocals to match. There was a time, 15-20 years ago, when demos like this ruled the land and were handed to you, burned onto archaic CD-Rs, in the vain hope you might play them in your car on the way home from the show. To not do so in this case would be inadvisable. There’s potential in the songwriting, yes, but also on a performance level, for growth as individuals and as a group, and considering where Mother Magnetic are starting in terms of chemistry, that’s all the more an exciting prospect.
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