Quarterly Review: Pia Isa, Sun and Sail Club, Vitskär Süden, Daevar, Endless Floods, Black on High, Anomalos Kosmos, Mountainwolf, The Giraffes, Filthy Hippies
Posted in Reviews on October 8th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Welcome back to the Fall 2024 Quarterly Review, which started yesterday and will continue through next Friday. This week and next week, my life is pretty much cutting up pizza for the kid, Hungarian homework, and this. I could do worse.
There’s good stuff in this one though, and a lot of it, today and really throughout. I hope you find something you think is cool, tomorrow or the next day if not today.
Quarterly Review #11-20:
—
Pia Isa, Dissolve
Pia Isaksen, also of Superlynx, offers a follow-up to 2022’s solo debut as Pia Isa, Distorted Chants (review here), and with songs like “Into the Fire” and “Dissolve,” a heavy-meditative take on grunge is imagined, with Isaksen‘s lumbering bass leading the way with a low rumble behind often quietly delivered vocals, and Ole Teigen‘s drums placed deep in a three-dimensional mix, and spaciousness added to the bulk of the proceedings through Gary Arce‘s signature floating guitar tone; the Yawning Man founder guests on guitar for six of the eight tracks, and is a not insignificant presence in complement and contrast to some of the more morose elements and rhythmic churning, as in “New Light.” But Isaksen is no stranger to crafting material heavy in ambience and mood as much as tone, and Dissolve feels like a deep-dive into experimentalism that pays off in the songs themselves. As Isaksen and Arce get ready to unveil their new collaborative project SoftSun, nothing here makes me look forward to that less.
—
Sun and Sail Club, Shipwrecked
I don’t know where the lines between genres are supposed to be anymore and I’m done pretending to care. If Sun and Sail Club had Barney from Napalm Death singing lead, you’d call them grindcore. It’s Tony Adolescents, making his second appearance with Sun and Sail Club after 2015’s The Great White Dope (review here), alongside founding guitarist Bob Balch (also Fu Manchu, Big Scenic Nowhere, etc.), bassist Scott Reeder (ex-Kyuss, Goatsnake, The Obsessed, etc.) and drummer Scott Reeder (Fu Manchu) for another mostly-blistering round of heavy punk, full in its charge and crossover punk-metal defiance, in “The Color of War” and the early-C.O.C.-esque “Drag the River,” which follows. Oh, and Balch gets a little surf in there too in “Tastes Like Blood” and the wistful bookending intro and outro. Borders on goth for a moment there, but it works. In the Balchian oeuvre — somewhere on the opposite side of the spectrum from where Slower now reside — Sun and Sail Club found itself as a project with The Great White Dope. Shipwrecked is correspondingly more aware of what the band wants their music to do as a result, and so able to hit more directly.
—
Vitskär Süden, Vessel
The third album from Los Angeles-based heavy progressive rockers Vitskär Süden, Vessel is quick to establish ambition as a central element. That is to say, in the depth of their arrangements vocally and instrumentally, in their ability to set and vary a mood, and in being able to convey a sense of experimentalism in a four-minute track with a hook like “R’lyeh,” Vitskär Süden come across as cognizant of trying new ideas in their material and bringing these to fruition in the finished products of the songs. The material feels built around specific parts, some rhythmic, some melodic, in “Through Tunnels They Move” it might be Inxs, maybe the piano and strings in “Hidden by the Day,” and so on, and that it isn’t always the same thing adds to the character brought by guitarist/synthesist Julian Goldberger, bassist/vocalist Martin Garner, guitarist TJ Webber and drummer Christopher Martin as the songs coalesce and challenge the band’s own conceptions of their work as much as the listener’s. It is cinematic in both its sprawl and dramatic intent, and I won’t spoil the ending but yes of course it goes gospel.
—
Daevar, Amber Eyes
German murk-doomers Daevar keep affairs dark on their second long-player, Amber Eyes, as the trio of bassist/vocalist Pardis Latifi, guitarist Caspar Orfgren and drummer Moritz Ermen Bausch explore nodding patience and grim atmospherics across the six included cuts, and Windhand are still an influence, but “Pay to Pray” has a rolling, Acid King-style fluidity and the guitar takes to someplace more decisively evil, and Electric Wizardly, so you figure it out, because what it sounds like to me is Daevar beginning to step out from any single influence and to more comfortably find their own, often hypnotic niche, meeting the post-metallic feel of “Caliban and the Witch” with layered vocal harmonies before the megaplod finish. The title-track is faster and represents the grungier intentions, and if that’s the start of side B, then “Lizards” and “Grey in Grey” could only be called a plunge from there. The finale in particular is consuming in a way that reminds of Undersmile, which isn’t a complement I would lightly give.
The Lasting Dose Records on Bandcamp
—
Endless Floods, Rites Futurs
Have you ever heard Endless Floods and not wanted more? Me neither. The French art-doom four-piece made a single out of the eight-minute “Décennie” from their fourth full-length, Rites Futurs, and as that song works its way into a minimalist drone progression worthy of Earth before offering stark reassurance in intertwining human voices before exploding, gloriously, into a guitar solo the size of any number of partially undersea volcanoes, there is little that feels beyond the band’s creative reach. Volume is a part of what makes the material so affecting, with a progressive metal-style fullness of tone and voices treated to become part of what’s creating the sense of space. In its quiet reaches and surges of worshipful sounds — the choir on “Forge,” for example — Rites Futurs is somehow dystopian, but it’s not an empty world “after” humans. There’s life in these songs, in the way the title-track builds into its post-punk shove and then just into this undulation of noise is twice as universe-devouring for the acoustic guitar that emerges by itself on the other side. Underrated band.
—
Black on High, Echoes Through Time
Dark heavy rock with a metallic underpinning that seems to come forward in “She Was a Witch” more than, say, opener “Alleyway Ecstasy,” from Black on High‘s debut, Echoes Through Time, notably brings elements from the likes of Mastodon and Alice in Chains together with songs that don’t just retain their immediacy but build upward from the leadoff, so that “Take These Pills” in the penultimate spot of the tracklisting becomes a punk rock apex for a trajectory the Dallas-based four-piece with members of Gypsy Sun Revival and Turbid North set forth on “I Feel Lethal,” and the drop into lower gears for the closing title-track seems to hit that much harder as a return. It’s like the meme where the riff comes back but heavier and Vince McMahon or whoever is laser-eye stoked, except it’s set up across the whole album and not actually so simple as that, and Echoes Through Time ends up being more about the journey than the destination. Fine. It’s a high level of craft for being a first record, and it feels like the beginning of an evolution for a longer term.
—
Anomalos Kosmos, Live at 102 FM
Greek experimentalist two-piece Anomalos Kosmos may or may not evoke a Grails-y impression with their ’70s-prog-informed soundtrack-style instrumentals, but the thing is, with Live at 102 FM, they seem at least to be making it up as they go along. Sure, looping this or that layer to fill out the sound helps, as “Flow + Improv 1” proves readily in its first half, then again in its second, but what makes it jazz is that the exploration is happening for the creator and the consumer at the same time. It gets weird, and weirder, and “The + Improv 2” throws down a swinging groove for a bit after that vocal sample in the last couple minutes, but even if part of “Me Orizeis” is plotted as opposed to being 100 percent made up like they just walked into the room and that noise happened, it represents a vibrant and encompassing process that can’t help but feel organic as it’s recorded live. The band’s 2022 debut, Mornin Loopaz (review here) was both more restless and more concept-based. I like that I have no idea how Anomalos Kosmos might follow this.
—
Mountainwolf, Dust on a New Moon
Maybe it won’t come as a shocker that a live record with takes on the band’s songs that are upwards of 14, 17, 19, 23 minutes long is expansive? Maryland’s Mountainwolf offer seven tracks across Dust on a New Moon, which were recorded live at some point, somewhere, ever, maybe at New Year’s? I don’t want to speculate. In any case, what happens over the course of the ‘evening with’ is Mountainwolf plunge into an Appalachian vision of Earthless-style instrumental epicness. East Coast groove set to a more Pacific ideology; I guess at a certain point jams is jams. Mountainwolf have plenty of those, and while it’s not at all their first live release, Dust on a New Moon unfolds the sludgy crash of “Edging” and the bassy jabs of “Heroin x 1991” with purpose in each twist of turn captured. I assume the show is a little different every night as a given song might go here or there, but it sounds like a show worth seeing, to say the very least of it.
—
The Giraffes, Cigarette
The Giraffes don’t have to be out there burnin’ barns, but Cigarette is indeed incendiary in “Pipes” and “Limping Horse,” and that’s barely a fraction of the business the long-running New York outfit get done in short order across their eighth album’s 34 minutes. NYC has had its share of underheralded heavy rock bands and so fair enough for The Giraffes being part of a longstanding tradition, but the moody vibe in “Lazarus,” the eerie modernity cast in “Baby Pictures,” and the citified twang in “Dead Bird” — which is fair enough to consider Americana since it’s about drug addiction — or the way “The Shot” has a kind of punctuated strut that is so much the band’s own, it’s worth reiterating that The Giraffes have earned far more plaudits than they’ve ever received for their recorded work, and as “Pipes” and “Million Year Old Song” bring a bluesy tinge to the madcap groove, I don’t know Cigarette will change that or if the band would even want it to if it did, but they’re an institution in New York’s underground and LPs like this are why.
—
Filthy Hippies, Share the Pill
While the drift of psychedelia ranges further back, there’s something about even the most shimmering of moments on Filthy Hippies‘ Share the Pill that’s much more ’97 than ’67, more Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine adding a current of noise to the mellow-heavy groove, maybe. That’s all well and good but doesn’t account for the universe-tearing “Good Time” or the spacey post-punk of “Catatonic” (though maybe it does, in the case of the latter) or the dub-psych roll “Stolen From Heaven” that bridges the two halves of the record, so take it for what it is. The stylistic truth of Filthy Hippies is more complex than the superficial trappings of drug rock might lead one to believe, and it’s not without its challenging aspects, even though the material in pieces like “Candy Floss” or the tambourine-insistent “Dreaming of Water” veers readily into poppish frequencies. There doesn’t seem to be a ton that’s off limits, but it feels rooted in heavy groove just the same and that sits well next to the flashes of the brighter contrast.
—
