Album Review: Yawning Balch, Volume Three
Posted in Reviews on March 3rd, 2025 by JJ Koczan
The story goes that in 2022, the component members of Yawning Balch got together in Joshua Tree with no real plan or ideology, jammed for five hours, and in that time produced enough material on the spot so that in 2023, they would release Volume One (review here) and Volume Two (review here) with material culled and edited from that single session. Signed to Heavy Psych Sounds, the band is based around the root collaboration of its guitarists — Bob Balch (also Fu Manchu, Slower, Sun and Sail Club, ex-Minotaur, etc.) and Gary Arce (also Yawning Man, Yawning Sons, SoftSun, Ten East, etc.) — and in April 2024, another five-hour jam took place from whence the two songs and 34 minutes of Volume Three are taken.
A shift in lineup brings Mario Lalli (Fatso Jetson, Yawning Man, Big Scenic Nowhere, Mario Lalli and the Rubber Snake Charmers, etc.) to the band on bass alongside drummer Bill Stinson (Yawning Man, Big Scenic Nowhere), and while one is immediately curious if there’s a Volume Four on the way behind it, Volume Three offers escapist resonance in its instrumentalist, mellow post-desert vibe.
Like the first session, the (of course) April 20, 2024, jaunt was recorded and mixed by Dan Joeright, who plays in SoftSun with Arce, and mastered by Wo Fat‘s Kent Stump at Crystal Clear Sound. The two component pieces of Volume Three — “The Taos Hum” (20:27) and “Winter Widow” (14:02) — have enough divergence between them to create a shift in mood from one to the next, but the greater crux of what Yawning Balch do and have done up to this point has been in the exploration. “The Taos Hum” fades in around effects-laced snare drum for almost immediate hypnotic cast, and before the first minute is through, they’re in it. Locked in and rolling. I know that’s the magic of editing, and that in a five-hour session, surely there were flubs, missed notes from whatever might’ve been intended, what usually qualifies as “warts and all,” and that the nature of recording an album is such that that stuff gets deleted and the listener gets a finished product.
So maybe it shouldn’t be such a shocker that Yawning Balch, a group of experienced players well familiar with each other whether that’s Arce and Lalli working together in Yawning Man going back nearly 40 years or Balch and Arce deepening the connection that began in Big Scenic Nowhere circa 2019 with this adjacent outfit, or Stinson serving as the grounding element for much of all of it, including Volume Three, on which he provides another casual-attire masterclass in drumming for fluidity.
From those first echoing snares and the hits cutting through the sprawl of guitar tone from Arce and Balch, the drums hold the languidity of the tempo for an especially molten feel, and if Volume Three is intended to run hot and cold — i.e., Taos, New Mexico, is hot, and winter, referenced in “Winter Widow,” is cold — then it makes sense that the guitar sounds so very sweaty. If you’d listen to it more literally, for the “hum,” there’s a bit of a drone that emerges later on, but “The Taos Hum” is never actually so still as its title might imply, instead coursing outward on long solo stretches and sections of effects wash like that before eight minutes in, where the listener might suddently snap to and realize three minutes have disappeared and there’s a whole lot going on. Is the “hum” in there? Probably, but so is a Mario Lalli bassline, so there’s plenty going on besides.
By the time it’s 15 minutes in, “The Taos Hum” has resolved a long set of twisting lines and begun its final movement, the band getting their feet under them for a moment and pressing forward. They bring the jam to a head with due swirl and some residual noise, and “Winter Widow” starts with standalone guitar shimmering out there on its own. Building in volume, welcoming the drums and bass in the second minute, unfolding with a quiet grace in the intermingling of high and low end, Lalli‘s bassline seeming first to answer back to what the guitar is playing and then fall in step alongside it, the song finding its shape organically across the first five minutes or so before settling into a pattern. That process itself offers some light suspense — is it going to hold together of course yes it is or it wouldn’t be on the record — but the point here is immersion, and that thread continues in the side B piece as well.
As for the temperature, if you want to read it as colder, go ahead. Certainly one can get an impression of a crystalline lattice in the slow downward float of Arce‘s guitar around seven minutes in, but I don’t know where intention on the band’s part ends and the power of suggestion begins, so take it as you will. That, in the end, emerges as one of the strengths of Yawning Balch‘s third outing. Not only does it confirm the band as not a one-off (or a two-off, as it were) with their first session, and give a look at the changing dynamic in the band as Lalli returns to the Yawning Man-et-all fold while splitting his time playing with Brant Bjork Trio and El Padre el Don (currently on tour with Colour Haze), but it serves as the latest chapter in the Arce/Balch narrative, which has seen the chemistry that was already there when Big Scenic Nowhere did their first EP flourish into something distinct enough that Yawning Balch need to be a band separate from all of these guys’ other bands with each other. There’s more to explore, in other words, and Yawning Balch sound ready to embrace that particular unknown.
Is Volume Four coming? Will they somewhat inevitably make a Black Sabbath reference in the title? I kind of hope not. More, I hope Yawning Balch push past the trilogy trap and keep going. Part of what Volume Three offers — on the most basic level, it’s 34 minutes of Bob Balch, Gary Arce, Mario Lalli and Bill Stinson playing music that you don’t yet own; are you going to stand for that? — is a vision of desert jams that look beyond janga-janga stoner rock riffing (nothing against it) and, with a spirit of improvisation, try to expand the palette of the genre, either actively or passively. Surely these are worthy adventures to undertake. As “Winter Widow” eases to its finish, having mined a progression from out of thin air, once more the band excellently frame a movement from out of what was clearly a broader take, and they leave off as they invariably would with some leftover melody on guitar to hand the listener back to reality. Seems a little cruel, considering the alternative they lay out.
Yawning Balch, Volume Three (2025)
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