Posted in Bootleg Theater on December 13th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Yawning Man and Fatso Jetson‘s split LP was released on April 26, 2013. That put it roughly concurrent to a performance at Desertfest London 2013 that, in succession at The Underworld in Camden Town, saw Yawning Sons, Yawning Man and Fatso Jetson take the stage. I was fortunate enough to be there to see it, and what I didn’t appreciate 11 years ago was that, for most of those in the room, it was a generational event, a kind of reemergence of the Californian desert underground of the 1990s, being greeted by a crowd by and large too young to have had the experience the first time around. It was easy to appreciate the succession, with UK progressive then-instrumentalists Sons of Alpha Centauri collaborating with Yawning Man‘s Gary Arce in Yawning Sons, Yawning Man finding Arce pulling immediate double-duty, this time next to bassist Mario Lalli, who’d move to guitar for Fatso Jetson‘s banger of a set. And it was a hell of a thing to witness. This split would seem to be what everybody grabbed at the merch table afterward.
In my defense, it was my first time seeing any of those bands too, so I’ll ask you to forgive me for not having at the time an insight so easily come by with 11 years’ hindsight. What kind of outfit is this? You call that perspective? Last time I read this filth. And so on.
I know, huge surprise I’d be too busy living in my own head to see what was going on around me — I get that you’re shocked; me too — and I’m sure that Spring all kinds of people in all kinds of places had their own experiences with Yawning Man and Fatso Jetson on the stage, picking up the split in the meantime, and that’s all valid. Standing there in The Underworld, watching Yawning Sons — to-date, a once-in-a-lifetime experience for me — unfurl surreal desert interpretations into Yawning Man having their songs recognized immediately by the crowd waiting for them, into the blues-boogie-blowout offered by Fatso Jetson; it was a thing to behold. I got a copy later, but at the time, didn’t even have a turntable and was bummed out they didn’t make a CD. That happened a lot around then. I got over a turntable and got — maybe just a smidgen — over myself and moved on with my life.
As anyone who left the merch table either at Desertfest or wherever, whenever knew long before I would eventually found out, this split is 21 minutes of pure where-it’s-at. Each side offers two songs, and instead of splitting up A and B sides by band, it’s set as A B B A with Yawning Man as A and Fatso Jetson as B, the LP starts strong with Yawning Man‘s “Dark Meet” and Fatso Jetson‘s “Mono Decay,” then keeps the flow going with Fatso Jetson‘s “Trans World Sleep” and Yawning Man‘s “Underwater Noise.”
Should it be any great surprise that they’re complementary sounds? Mario Lalli has been in Yawning Man intermittently for the last 40-ish years, and was at this time, so there’s shared personnel, but even more than that, both bands emerged out of the California desert of the early and mid-’90s and helped set the pattern that would become ‘desert rock’ as it’s known today — a movement of sound not nearly as tied to landscape as some might posit, however born of it it might be. “Dark Meet” has some prescient proggy edge in its guitar, but the way it rounds out by coming apart gives Fatso Jetson‘s “Mono Decay” — which, like much of their 2010 album, Archaic Volumes (discussed here, review here), features sax from Vince Meghrouni alongside Lalli‘s guitar and vocals, Larry Lalli‘s bass, Dino von Lalli‘s guitar and Tony Tornay‘s drums — a blank slate from which to solidify its intro.
“Mono Decay” is probably the most ‘active’ of the cuts on the split in terms of rhythmic movement, the sax bouncing along with the snare, the solo later on adding a noisy affect to the whole before, seemingly, swallowing it, and letting go to the New Wave strum that begins “Trans World Sleep.” They don’t do it all the time, but Fatso Jetson are well suited to both psychedelic and space rocks, and at 6:51, the longest track of the four here puts emphasis on that; a build that doesn’t lack impact but works well both times they let the tension go. The last one, a howl brought to a quick mute, lets Alfredo Hernandez start “Underwater Noise” on drums before the guitar kicks in to ultimately carry the song.
A mellow bassline from Lalli coincides with Arce‘s signature float, wisping out along a lead line that is melodic in character but works too with the heavier riffing that emerges with a push before the song hits the 90-second mark. The twists give way to an effects-laced middle, but return on the other side and resume the build, which when they hit into the dreamy part again, is where they leave it, riding that sun-coated drift to a longer fade. Like Fatso Jetson‘s inclusions, “Underwater Noise” — and “Dark Meet” for that matter — isn’t not so vastly removed from what Yawning Man were doing a couple years earlier on 2010’s Nomadic Pursuits (discussed here, review here), but for both of these bands, it was an important era. Having more of it beyond the LPs anchoring is a boon. I never gave this split enough credit.
And that stretch of, what, two hours, maybe?, at Desertfest London didn’t just confirm desert legends for the crowd around me — it did for me, too, however much of a convert I may already have been at the time. With enough years after the fact, it’s easy to see that night, this split, as a landmark, with two bands almost educating their listenership about who they are and what they do. If you were hearing either band for the first time, if you caught some Yawning Man in passing and don’t know where to start with Fatso Jetson, and anyway, you heard their stuff could get pretty weird sometimes (true, which is a strength!) — I can’t imagine starting with their 2013 split and going wrong. It’s been doing the job for a generation.
Thanks for reading. As always, I hope you enjoy.
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Noon! What. the. hell. I like a Friday that ends, if it has to start at all, by 10AM. I also prefer not to wake up with my back so stiff I feel like I can’t move, but, well, one is in one’s 40s.
I actually re-set my alarm twice this morning, at least part in the hope of finding myself in a more favorable position one then two half-hours later, and slept late. The Patient Mrs.’ semester ended this week, and her being home also kind of means that whatever entirely reasonable errand needs to be done that day — in this case it was filing more paperwork for a legal name change for The Pecan with the court in Morristown, which has become something of a rush, alongside a passport change; we have a hearing with a judge in a couple weeks; everything has more forms when you’re doing it on behalf of a minor, and yeah, duh — isn’t get backburnered so I can get back here and bang out a post about somebody’s video. A question of stakes, then.
Hopefully you found something good in the Quarterly Review, perhaps that you hadn’t heard before. I ended up putting at least one thing from every day in the notes for my year-end list, which told me how padded-out it was with stuff I knew I’d dig, more than anything else. Whatever. My Quarterly Review. I’m not obligated to slate anything I don’t want to. Usually. Ha.
This weekend I’ll start actually putting together the year-end coverage. Oof, it’s gonna be a lot. I might not actually get started writing until Monday — we’ve got plans on Sunday with friends — but I’ll do my best to bang through it efficiently. I was hoping to review The Whims of the Great Magnet’s new one before I got there, but it might need to wait after.
Figure Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday — at least — will just be writing the big year-end to-do. I ask your patience if you don’t see anything else around here until then.
And as always, I wish you a great and safe weekend. Have fun, watch your head, take some Advil if you need it. I’m back Monday with maybe nothing. We’ll see how it goes.
Posted in Reviews on November 19th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
SoftSun is the three-piece of bassist/vocalist Pia Isaksen, guitarist Gary Arce and drummer Dan Joeright, all of whom come to the new project with pedigree. Joeright was in Aboleth and Earth Moon Earth, and has recorded some of Arce‘s other projects in recent years, whether it’s desert rock progenitors Yawning Man, which Arce co-founded in the 1980s or Big Scenic Nowhere, and Arce played guitar on three of the songs on the 2022 solo debut from Isaksen (who also fronts Oslo’s Superlynx), Distorted Chants (review here), and six of the eight total on this year’s follow-up, Dissolve (review here), so nobody is a stranger to each other here. If one were to view Daylight in the Dark, the first SoftSun full-length, as following the thread of the two Isaksen solo records in tightening the collaboration with Arce with Joeright producing (Aaron Farinelli co-engineered) and drumming, that’s a fair enough contextual read on how the band might’ve happened, if not necessarily the actual story of the six-song/41-minute record, which lives up to the adage of being broader than the sum of its parts.
For those who know Arce‘s oeuvre in Yawning Man, Yawning Sons, Yawning Balch, Ten East, Dark Tooth Encounter, and so on, he’s on form throughout Daylight in the Dark, harnessing tonal expanse and a sense of improvised instrumental exploration set to the steady grooves of Joeright; very much the daylight to the encompassing low end wrought in Isaksen‘s basslines, which in turn become the ‘dark’ being referenced in the title. What’s not accounted for in that admittedly simple math are Isaksen‘s vocals, which through Superlynx and into her solo work carry an ethereal reverb like a resonant calling card. Her performance on vocals here is emotive and fragile — on “Continents” she asks for a shifting of tectonic plates with particular longing, and the bleaker “Exit Wounds” is greeted with due brooding — and balanced dynamically in the mix to be more forward at times while buried elsewhere within the morass of effects and psychedelic-leaning fluidity.
This is all well and good, but what’s most surprising about Daylight in the Dark ends up being how heavy it is. Opener “Unholy Waters,” “Daylight in the Dark” and “Exit Wounds” appear in succession before side A closes with “Continents,” and through all of them, the upward float of Arce‘s guitar — which is as staple an element as you get; it’s what he does, and oftentimes even his repeated riffs are structured airy leads — is answered decisively with the low breadth of Isaksen‘s tone. On “Exit Wounds,” the bass is outright doomed, and even “Continents,” which is a bit more gentle in pushing the vocals forward and gives a little more of a verse/chorus feel than, say, the title-track, which also has a structure but feels as much about ambience as it reaches simultaneously upward and down tonally in exactly this fashion. That dynamic would seem to put Joeright in the middle of the proceedings in the holding-it-all-together role, but that’s not really the case. It’s not like Daylight in the Dark is a collection of disparate jams. These are composed songs — when the title-track seems to take off right as it hits the midpoint, it’s not an accident — and however nebulous their outward face might be, the chemistry and persona behind them is purposeful and something that has developed over several years.
That gives SoftSun something of an advantage going into a first record, but hearing Daylight in the Dark in comparison to Isaksen‘s Dissolve — which is probably the closest analogue; released the same year with at least two-thirds the same personnel working from a similar foundation of influence — it feels like Isaksen and Arce, in company with Joeright, have organically arrived at a next stage of working together, and that’s the band itself. What might be most encouraging about that is the sense of refresh they give to each other’s sounds. From Mario Lalli to Billy Cordell and plenty of others besides, Arce has played with more than a handful of bassists over the last 30-plus years. Isaksen‘s low end complements his guitar like none of them. It comes from a different place — yes, literally, from Norway, but I’m talking stylistically — and feels more rooted in metal and, as noted, doom, while both instrument and vocals are treated with echo and whatever else such that even the violent implications of a song like the penultimate “Dragged Across the Desert Floor” becomes a gorgeously languid roll with the blend of daylight, dark, and groove that comprises it.
Not only that, but the bass seems to be a feature in Joeright‘s mix for these songs more than it often is in Arce‘s work. One might be tempted to compare SoftSun and the Arce-inclusive one-off Zun album from 2016, Burial Sunrise (review here) — or at least the half of it that Sera Timms (Black Math Horseman) sang on — but in that too, the bass shines in righteous differentiation. Daylight in the Dark is richer for the depth, and even as the eponymous “Soft Sun” closes as the longest inclusion at over 11 minutes long, what’s being reinforced — expanded on, even, with keyboard-esque sounds that emerge in the early going and meld with the guitar if they were ever there in the first place — is the distinct impression that the album makes separate either from any of these three artists’ previous work.
Sound like hyperbole, I know. I’m not saying that Isaksen‘s voice and bass or Arce‘s guitar aren’t recognizable in the slow immersion of “Soft Sun,” but that like the album that precedes it, the finale emphasizes how much the two bring to the band’s sound and how well their styles play off of each other. The result — and I’m not trying to downplay Joeright‘s contributions, either on drums or in the recording process; clearly he’s essential personnel — is that SoftSun occupies a new niche branched off from all three respective discographies, and the only remaining question I’m left with is what the future will bring. Could be SoftSun is a one-shot deal and Isaksen, Arce and Joeright will go their separate ways, or Daulight in the Dark could very easily be the beginning of a longer-term aural progression, putting a different spin on heavy post-rock and desert-hued psych and growing as the band — live shows? — moves forward. This debut, a first showing of who SoftSun are and what they might become over time, leaves one hopeful.
Posted in Whathaveyou on September 10th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
There’s a chant-like quality to Gary Arce‘s guitar on the first SoftSun single from their upcoming debut album, Daylight in the Dark, and if “Unholy Water” is representative in any way of the scope of the rest of the LP — as one would hope, considering it’s also the first song the project has ever released — that will be just fine for how fluidly Pia Isaksen‘s vocals rest alongside.
Isaksen, also of Superlynx and adjacent solo work, and Arce, also of Yawning Man and numerous orbital projects, are joined in SoftSun by drummer/engineer Dan Joeright, also of Earth Moon Earth, who gives shape to the flow on “Unholy Water,” and while it should come as no surprise to anybody familiar with any of the trio’s work elsewhere that atmosphere is a central focus, it is, and it works. You know who they are. They know who they are. Everybody vibes accordingly.
As previously announced, it’s Ripple Music handling the release, and I look forward to exhausting my metaphors for languid, liquefied groove sometime between now and Nov. 8 when Daylight in the Dark comes out. Until that happens, here’s this from the PR wire:
SOFTSUN (with Yawning Man, Pia Isa members) to release debut album “Daylight in the Dark” on Ripple Music; first track streaming!
SoftSun, the new dronegaze and post-rock trio formed by Gary Arce (Yawning Man, Fatso Jetson) on guitar, Pia Isaksen (Pia Isa) on bass and vocals and Dan Joeright (Earth Moon Earth) on drums, announce the release of their debut album “Daylight in the Dark” this November 8th through Ripple Music.
SoftSun is the result of a divine collaboration between very unique and visionary musicians. Pia Isaksen and Gary Arce along with Dan Joeright come from opposite sides of the world. Vocalist and bass player Pia Isaksen grew up in Norway, while Gary Arce and drummer Dan Joeright are based in the Southern California Mojave desert.
The environments they occupy are evident in the beautifully heavy yet ethereal sound of this band. Arce’s dreamscaping cinematic guitar work gives a stark contrast of balance to the heavy melodic bass driven compositions. Pia’s voice, ethereal in nature, levitates the sound and brings a dreamlike shoegaze quality to the songs. Cocteau Twins, True Widow, Yawning Man, Diiv would be appropriate reference points for this unique approach to songwriting.
Debut album “Daylight in the Dark” Out November 8th on Ripple Music (LP/CD/digital)
TRACKLIST: 1. Unholy Waters 2. Daylight in the Dark 3. Exit Wounds 4. Continents 5. Dragged Across the Desert Floor 6. Soft Sun
SoftSun was formed in 2023 by Gary Arce, Pia Isaksen and Dan Joeright after Arce and Isaksen had been wanting to make music together for several years. It all started in 2020 when Arce played guitar on the first album by Isaksen’s solo project Pia Isa. Discovering how perfect their musical expressions fit together they knew they really wanted to create more music together. With Arce’s unique and beautiful guitar melodies and sounds, Isaksen’s heavy bass and haunting vocals combined with Joeright’s perfectly patient drumming, SoftSun delivers heavy mellow and dreamy music with its own sound.
After a few years of collaborating on two of Pia’s albums from opposite sides of the planet (Moss in Norway and Yucca Valley in California) and becoming good friends, Gary and Pia finally met in person in late 2023. They instantly became inseparable and started planning their musical project.
The first SoftSun songs were written by Pia in Moss and sent to with Gary who wrote guitar melodies for them in Yucca Valley before Pia then got on the plane to California in January 2024. During three weeks they wrote more songs and got together with drummer and studio owner Dan Joeright who turned out to be a perfect fit for the band. After only three practices and two and a half days in Gatos Trail Recording Studio, the trio recorded their first album live. The vocals were done by Pia back in Norway before. Dan then mixed the album. On Pia’s next trip to California six weeks later, the trio booked another studio session and recorded a few more songs. The result is their debut album “Daylight in the Dark”, to be released in November 2024 through Californian independent label Ripple Music.
The album was engineered by Dan Joeright and Aaron Farinelli at Gatos Trail Recording Studio, mixed by Dan Joeright and mastered by Kent Stump. Artwork and layout by Pia Isaksen.
SOFTSUN line-up Gary Arce – Guitars Pia Isaksen – Bass and vocals Dan Joeright – Drums
Whether or not it actually was for the band themselves — and we’ll get to why in a minute provided I don’t get sidetracked by sweet tonal resonance — it’s arguable that Nomadic Pursuits (review here) was a new beginning for Californian desert rock progenitors Yawning Man. True, it’s their second LP. Prior to its release in 2010 through Cobraside Distribution, the three-piece of guitarist Gary Arce, bassist Mario Lalli and drummer Alfredo Hernandez had offered their debut in 2005’s Rock Formations (discussed here) and companioned that with the Pot Head EP, and the two would be coupled into the compilation Vista Point in 2007, but by the time three years had gone by, all three of those discs were pretty difficult to come by. Nomadic Pursuits brought the instrumentalist trio a new degree of professionalism in terms of sonic character and depth, and presented what was by then a band more than two decades old as having a fresh perspective on the aural niche they helped create. The richness of its sound, whether that’s Lalli‘s fleet low-end in “Sand Whip” and “Far-Off Adventure” or Arce‘s lightly melancholic reverb in “Camel Tow” (also “Camel Tow Too,” later), the circles around which they instrumentalist trio seem to be running around at the culmination of “Sand Whip” or the indie quirk underlying closer “Laster Arte,” set a balance between serenity and heft that in some crucial ways has been a defining aspect of their work since.
On the most basic level, the band — through various Arce-led incarnations — has done much more after 2010 than they’d done prior. Never ones to shy away from reissues, Yawning Man‘s The Birth of Sol: The Demo Tapes (discussed here) collected early recordings (put on actual cassettes, mind you) from their early days circa 1986 and arrived in 2009, also through Cobraside, but the album, EP, and two comps comprised the entirety of Yawning Man‘s studio output for nearly a quarter-century before Nomadic Pursuits. In the 14 years since, in addition to regular international touring, Arce and company — my understanding gleaned from social media is the band currently features the founding guitarist alongside a recently-stepped-back-in Lalli on bass and likewise-returned drummer Bill Stinson, and that they’re recording with Jason Simon of Dead Meadow guesting in some capacity, but they’re fluid in personnel as well as craft, so don’t quote me on any of that — have done four studio LPs, two live albums, a crucial 2013 split with Fatso Jetson, and overseen a full series of catalog reissues, including for Nomadic Pursuits, through Italian forerunner imprint Heavy Psych Sounds. As regards productivity, they’re much more of a band now than they were when they were starting out as kids jamming in the Californian desert.
Maybe that’s just the way of things. Maybe it takes a while sometimes to realize when you have something special going on and you’re a part of it, or maybe Yawning Man‘s own legacy was bolstered as a result of the on-internet proliferation of the generator-party desert rock narrative, like sandy Southern California in the late ’80s and early ’90s was peopled by roving bands of stoned teenaged marauders worshiping the god of (I believe) Larry Lalli‘s gas powered generator, rogue hillside and defunct skatepark trespass concerts becoming the stuff of hyper-romanticized legend. The sound of freedom in a particularly dirty-footed American heavy-hippie ideal. I don’t know if that’s how it went and the truth of history is it doesn’t matter if that’s what’s become the narrative, but by 2010, Yawning Man were ready to be more than just that band Kyuss covered that one time and to get some fraction of their due as essential to the shape of what their microgenre became. More than just an obscure band people talked about in the past tense.
And what is a nomadic pursuit if not exploration? The 42-minute seven-tracker bears that out in the unfolding of “Far-Off Adventure” — the longest inclusion at 8:28 — as well as the peacefully expansive centerpiece “Blue Foam,” with Arce‘s guitar looped or layered or its-14-years-later-and-I-still-don’t-know-how-it’s-talking-to-itself-across-channels-like-that, or the more rhythmically restless “Ground Swell,” on which Hernandez goes full-on with a jazzy showcase, and “Camel Tow Too,” which takes a different route from the same central progression as the opener and becomes more than a simple reprise for it. Emblematic of their approach generally, there’s more happening across Nomadic Pursuits than simple hit-record-and-go jamming. They’re following a structure, even if it’s not always obvious, or at very least they have some idea in mind of where they’re headed before they get there, however nebulous that might be. But the material throughout is an exploration of atmospheres and moods and different textures and energies, the shifts in pacing and broader activity level between “Sand Whip” and “Blue Foam” representative of a dynamic that’s only grown more encompassing in the years since.
It would be that aforementioned split with Fatso Jetson — which was issued concurrent to say-hi-to-the-next-generation appearances at Desertfest London 2013 (review here) that also included a set from Yawning Man offshoot Yawning Sons in a landmark one-two-three succession — that pushed further in cementing Yawning Man as a influential and veteran outfit to a new listenership, but I’ll gladly maintain that Nomadic Pursuits is the work that allowed that to happen in the first place, and that its value in listening holds up as more than preface for what they’d do afterward across the 2010s and into the tumultuous first half of this decade. As they approach a 40th anniversary since their inception, Yawning Man are more reality than legend, which considering the legend involved should be read as a compliment, and as both an entity unto themselves in sound and a nexus point around which numerous other Arce-involved projects orbit, whether that’s Yawning Sons, already noted, or Yawning Balch, Big Scenic Nowhere, the forthcoming SoftSun, and so on. Like the joshua, their family tree is an expanding fractal of branches and constant new growth.
I already mentioned they’re working on new recordings. Their latest album, Long Walk of the Navajo (review here), was released last year on Heavy Psych Sounds. If you’re looking for where to head next, that’d be a good stop to make.
In any case, I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading.
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As will happen, I had been stuck on trying to find a record with which to close out this week, and it wasn’t until I was taking the dog around the block at quarter-to-six this morning that Nomadic Pursuits came to mind. Part of why it did was because in 2010 when I originally reviewed it, my wife and I were spending a summer month — it was the two of us and the little dog Dio back then — at a cabin in Vermont. She was working on her Ph.D. dissertation. I was writing stories that would become part of my graduate thesis. We’d write early in the day then pop down the hill for a beer — I still drank then — and once or twice a month I popped back down to NJ for band practice like the four-hour ride was no big deal.
Easy to romanticize that trip now. No question life was less complex before we had a kid in ways I can hardly appreciate most of the time from the deeply frustrating trenches of parenthood. But I read the photo caption in that review and found I was bitching about the heat — something I was doing not two weeks ago here as well; I’d like to flatter myself into thinking I’ve become more grateful for what I have, or at least presenting myself that way; this may be and more likely is a delusion; you’d have to ask The Patient Mrs. probably when I’m not in the room — and was reminded that while looking back can often put a sepia-toned spin on one’s experiences, there are ups and downs to everything while you’re living through it.
I write this as my wife and daughter argue in the next room about eating yogurt for breakfast. The kid, picking up from yesterday’s obnoxious without losing the beat of contradictory impulse that makes so many of our days and doings brutal. Now whimpering for something or other. Ugh. Our niece, 15, flew into town yesterday and The Pecan has been turbocharged as a result. This morning’s derailing, not unexpected, has proceeded in pinches, bites, punches, kicks for my wife and I. I look forward to being nostalgic about this era, to whatever else I might be blinded as a result. Maybe in middle age I’m less committed to remembering the reality of a thing. Fine.
I hope I forget being the less preferred parent. I hope I forget the way I get ignored when I ask my kid to do something, or tell her, or do anything other than threaten to end whatever kind of fun she’s having at the moment, or yell at her to finally do it because I feel helpless and like that’s the only way I can actually get her to acknowledge I’m speaking. I hope I forget feeling like a failure all the time, that I failed before I started and I’ve been failing since, here, at home, everywhere. I hope in the years to come I can whitewash all of it into a succession of the positive memories, of her creativity, her intelligence and cleverness, her four-dinensional thinking and the positive manifestations of her excited spirit, all of which are as much a part of her as the rest that is so crushing and overwhelming.
My time is up. Great and safe weekend. Thanks for reading. Brant Bjork Trio plays A38 in Budapest on Monday. Look for a review Tuesday, and I’m halfway through a Worshipper album review that I hope to finish at the nearest opportunity. Until then, then.
Posted in Whathaveyou on May 2nd, 2024 by JJ Koczan
There’s only one snippet posted on Instagram, and I couldn’t even manage to embed that properly — for what it’s worth, the track is called “Daylight in the Dark” — but SoftSun is a new trio featuring guitarist Gary Arce of Yawning Man, Big Scenic Nowhere, Zun, Ten East and copious others on the branches of one of desert rock’s broadest-reaching family trees, bassist/vocalist Pia Isaksen, aka Pia Isa for her solo work, of Norwegian atmospheric heavy nodders Superlynx, and drummer/recording engineer Dan Joeright, who in addition to playing in Earth Moon Earth runs the helm at Gatos Trail Recording Studio, where Yawning Man, Blasting Rod, The Freeks, Behold the Monolith and many more have recorded.
The roots of the collab would seem to be Arce‘s appearance on Pia Isa‘s 2022 album, Distorted Chants (review here), but either way, SoftSun have already been picked up to release their yet-untitled debut LP through Ripple Music sometime in the next however long, and if you do chase down that brief glimpse of “Daylight in the Dark” (which I’d suggest as your next stop), you’ll likely understand quickly why that’s something to look forward to.
Some background and label comment, from socials:
Says Ripple Music: Stoked to be bringing you this amazingly cool project! Please welcome SoftSun to the Ripple family!!
SoftSun is, left to right:
Dan Joeright (drums) who also plays in cosmic rock collective Earth Moon Earth, is a former member of The Rentals and has toured with many bands including Sasquatch and Ed Mundell. He is also the owner of the amazing Gatos Trail – Recording Studio in Yucca Valley where SoftSun record their music, and does the recording and mixing.
Pia Isaksen (bass/vocals) from Moss, Norway has played and written music most of her life and has spent a decade in heavy psych band Superlynx. She also has a dronegazey solo project called PIA ISA, and will release her second solo album this year.
Gary Arce (guitar) from La Quinta, California, known from Yawning Man, FATSO JETSON, Ten East, Dark Tooth Encounter, Big Scenic Nowhere, Yawning Balch etc. Since playing in the desert as young punk kid he has developed a unique style of playing and is known to create the most beautiful and dreamy sounds and melodies that sound like no one else. And he can never get enough foot pedals.
Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 26th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Dark Tooth Encounter‘s Soft Monsters was released in 2008 through Lexicon Devil, and is one of any number of projects in the oeuvre of guitarist Gary Arce of Yawning Man, who around this period was also collaborating with UK prog instrumentalists Sons of Alpha Centauri as Yawning Sons for the first time, as well as getting Yawning Man together as a touring act — they’d release Nomadic Pursuits (review here) in 2010 and enter more of a traditional-band existence rather than the vague-desert-legend status they’d enjoyed prior — demoing with Big Scenic Nowhere, who are now a real band much different than that demo, jamming with Ten East for the first two LPs in 2006 and 2008, collaborating with Hotel Wrecking City Traders out of Australia, on and on. I think even the Zun demo happened right around then too.
Arce‘s not exactly hard up for projects these days either, between Yawning Man actively releasing and touring, Yawning Balch bringing a similar lineup plus Bob Balch of Fu Manchu for two LPs in 2023, and a new LP on the way next week from Big Scenic Nowhere, which also has Arce and Balch paired, and whose drummer, Bill Stinson, also plays on Dark Tooth Encounter‘s Soft Monsters and holds the jams together in both Yawning Man (until last year) and the two Yawning Balch albums.
And I could be wrong about this, but I don’t think Stinson was in Yawning Man circa 2008 (original drummer Alfredo Hernandez played on Nomadic Pursuits), but Yawning Man also weren’t as active as they would be a few years after the fact, so while I’m not sure exactly how Dark Tooth Encounter happened, it might just have been a step-aside for Arce to work with Stinson alongside Ten East, whose second album, The Robot’s Guide to Freedom, surfaced concurrent to Soft Monsters.
Is that weird? Well, a little, but listening to Dark Tooth Encounter, it makes a little more sense since the mission on Soft Mirrors — seven songs/39 minutes, as if “ready for LP reissue” could be an actual runtime — is also a bit of a sidestep from either Yawning Man or Ten East. Mario Lalli — Fatso Jetson, Yawning Man, lately Mario Lalli and the Rubber Snake Charmers and the Brant Bjork Trio — sits in on bass for centerpiece “Radio Bleed,” but handles guitar on side A’s “Weeping Pines” and the finale “Engine Drone,” both of which have a subtle touch of the West Coast speaking to the East as regards ideas of ‘Southern’ in rock, Lalli and Arce‘s guitars allowing different textures to take hold than in, say, even the melancholy layers of keys and guitar in the penultimate “Hyper Air,” which feels prescient of All Them Witches in its full-room spaciousness, or opener “Alloy Pop,” wherein Arce (on guitar and bass) and Stinson (on drums and more drums, but always with class and a willingness to rest in a part while the guitar fleshes out) set the course for what Soft Monsters will be.
Part of that, as with most of Arce‘s work, comes from post-rock and post-punk more than the psychedelic subset of heavy with which Yawning Man are often lumped. Dark Tooth Encounter offers this with a feel that’s more worked on and structured, while still instrumental — though, is that a yell in the fade of “Alloy Pop?” did someone turn on a table saw? — giving a sense of the jams likely to have spawned the material in the first place but at the same time building more on top of those jams and refining them to be ‘songs’ in a verse/chorus sense; Arce is no stranger to proliferating instrumental hooks, and Dark Tooth Encounter takes advantage of its opportunities to showcase that in “Honey Hive,” with Stinson‘s snare accenting the rhythm of the guitar or the psych-jazz of “Deep Sleep Flower,” with Arce on keyboard, bass and lap steel in addition to standard guitar, the necessary layering process of which has me wondering which was recorded first, the bass or guitar.
Either way, “Deep Sleep Flower” resonates with more tonal heft than much of Soft Monsters, and that seems to be by design. Compared to the spaces left between the slow strums of “Weeping Pines,” on which Scott Reeder (currently Sovereign Eagle; see also Kyuss, Fireball Ministry, The Obsessed, Goatsnake, and Across the River with Mario Lalli and Alfredo Hernández [also later of Kyuss], who were kind of a precursor to Yawning Man and desert rock more generally in the mid-1980s; the Across the Riverdemo tape is the stuff of legend) takes up bass as Lalli moves to guitar.
Reeder also contributed to Ten East. Nobody’s a stranger here, and nobody sounds like one. That’s to the advantage of Soft Monsters generally, since as an instrumental offering it’s inherently going to benefit from the chemistry between the players involved; to be found in ample supply through “Radio Bleed” at the album’s center, spacey and weirdo proggy and so irrevocably desert hued in no small part because Arce and company have set those associations forward in the genre to start with. Maybe it’s a footnote or a one-off, but one might have said the same thing until just a few years ago about Big Scenic Nowhere, and that band came to be something completely different than when the name first showed up.
So maybe at some point there will be another Dark Tooth Encounter, but I’d expect if so, at least if it were to happen somewhere amid Arce‘s already-detailed list of current projects — which I’m just going to go out on a limb and say is incomplete — it would also take a different form than on Soft Monsters, since Arce, Lalli and Stinson spent most of the 2010s as Yawning Man. But one never knows — anything, ever — and neither Stinson nor Lalli are ‘in’ Yawning Man at the moment, so perhaps bringing Dark Tooth Encounter back in some form at some point would be a way to reignite that collaboration among the many others all these players past and present. You won’t hear me predict. You will hear me recommend this one for a Yawning Man or hypnotic-instrumental fan looking for a fix or a post-rocker looking for a bridge to something of heavier tonal presence. In other words, as always, I hope you enjoy.
Thank you for reading.
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If you tuned in last Friday, you probably caught the bit at the end where I talked about my laptop getting busted. Kid fell off the side of the couch — she runs on furniture when she gets an idea; it’s not something we encourage, but it’s something we live with, because theoretically you want a kid to be excited about ideas and movement is part of how she processes things intellectually and emotionally — and landed on my computer while also dumping my full iced tea cup on the same computer. Somehow she didn’t get wet, I assume because all the tea actually went inside the laptop, as if by now-is-the-time-for-this-thing-to-die magic.
A week later, I have perspective enough to see it could’ve been much worse. The Pecan wasn’t hurt; that’s always a plus. The laptop was going on six years old; it had a cracked case, couldn’t run unplugged, keys got stuck, on and on. Crucially — this is the one that makes it okay — the repair guy I use (TelStar Computers, Denville, NJ; a local small business I’m glad to support) was able to save the data on the hard drive, so I have that ready to go. From there, the hardest part has been accepting that because I’m using our own money rather than glut from the life-affirming crowdfunding campaign that got me that now-ex-laptop after I was robbed in the UK in 2018, I have to settle for a smaller screen with less desktop real estate to organize records, and give up an internal optical drive along with other bells and whistles. Still, a new laptop will allegedly be here on Tuesday, and I can’t look that gift horse in the mouth. I am privileged to be able to get another computer at all — the emergency backup Chromebook I call ‘Little Red’ is fine to visit, but nowhere I want to live — and I thank The Patient Mrs. for her getting-my-ass-in-gear efforts and her price-comparison research. My new one will be a Lenovo, which somehow makes me feel like a businessman. Expect copious corporatespeak, all synergisms and disruptional action assets and whatnots.
But this was kind of a bumpy, by-the-seat-of-my-pants week and I guess I made it through. I have a bio project for a death metal band (frickin’ a) to bang out this afternoon, so I’m going to leave it there and go immerse myself for a little bit in pummeling, bludgeoning extremity, and that’ll be a lot of fun I have no doubt.
Monday, a Sundrifter premiere. Tuesday I think a full-album stream for The Black Flamingo, though I need to check that. Wednesday I’m doubled up with premieres for Goat Major and a full-album stream for Troy the Band. Thursday is a full-album stream for Kariti, and next Friday I want to review the Guhts record, though it might be Monday, Feb. 5, before I get there. Either way, that’s what’s in my notes for next week, plus news posts, other videos that come up and whatever else catches the eye.
I hope you have a great and safe weekend. We’re in Connecticut tomorrow and are having company (like a double-playdate/brunch? oof, adulthood) on Sunday, so it’ll be busy, but I’m around if anyone needs me for anything. Don’t forget to hydrate, watch your head, all that stuff.
Posted in Features on December 18th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
[PLEASE NOTE: These are not the results of the year-end poll, which ends in January. If you haven’t contributed your picks yet, please do so here.]
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It is encouraging in the extreme to see heavy music, as both concept and practical reality, growing more diverse. For all its rebellious airs, rock and roll has always been predominantly white and male, and its heavy underground form is no different. But for any artform to survive let alone evolve, it has to be open to new ideas and perspectives, and I firmly believe that the underground is becoming a more inclusive community. It has a distance to go that can only be measured in light years, but progress is progress.
2023 was a stunner from the start, with early highlights that stuck around and were joined by more as the months progressed. And while we’re speaking about it in past tense and it’s wrap-up time and so on, there are still new releases coming out every day and week. All over the planet, the heavy underground represents a vibrant subculture, rife with creativity and purpose, speaking inside genre and out, and all the time looking to grow artistically and in terms of listenership. As a result, the work being released holds itself to a high standard.
And yes, that’s true even if it’s about bongs.
Actually, that such willful primitivism is taking place at the same as doom forays into goth, psych forays into mania and tone-worshipping stoner rock seems intent to both double-down on simplicity while expanding into increasingly progressive territory is emblematic of that very standard and the diversity among practitioners of these styles in the current and up and coming generation.
One could go on here, speculate on future directions and so forth, but frankly there isn’t time just now. The list you see below is mine. I made it. It’s informed by my listening habits — what I had on most — by what I see as the greatest level of achievement by the band in question, and in some cases by critical import. It’s a weird mix, but let’s face it, you don’t care. The bottom line is all I’m claiming to represent here is myself and this site.
Accordingly, as with every year, I’ll ask you to please be mindful of the feelings and opinions and others if and as you proffer your own. I love comments here, I love discussions on this post most of any throughout any year, every year, but that can’t happen if somebody’s being a jerk, so don’t. If you disagree with me or someone else, I don’t care if you have a 40-page treatise on your opinion or if you just don’t dig a thing, but if you’re seeing these words, it is our responsibility to each other to be respectful and kind.
Beyond that, in advance of what’s about to unfurl below, please know that I thank you for reading.
**NOTE**: If you’re looking for something specific, try a text search.
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The Top 60 Albums of 2023
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For the last two years (2022 and 2021, linked for reference), I’ve done my own list as a countdown from 60, and since it feels both like way too much, over-the-top, totally unnecessary, and like a completely inadequate sampling of what was worth hearing this year, I guess it’s the way to go once again. Right now is the first of three times I’ll encourage you not to skip this list.
This is the second. Here we go:
60. Codex Serafini, The Imprecation of Anima (review here)
59. Strider, Midnight Zen (review here)
58. Black Helium, Um (review here)
57. Humulus, Flowers of Death (review here)
56. Fuzz Evil, New Blood (review here)
55. Blood Lightning, Blood Lightning (review here)
54. Rotor, Sieben (review here)
53. Cleõphüzz, Mystic Vulture (review here)
52. Black Sky Giant, Primigenian (review here)
51. Khan, Creatures (discussed here)
50. Slumbering Sun, The Ever-Living Fire (review here)
49. Massive Hassle, Number One (review here)
48. Búho Ermitaño, Implosiones (review here)
47. Black Moon Circle, Leave the Ghost Behind (review here)
46. Oldest Sea, A Birdsong, a Ghost (review here)
45. Edena Gardens, Dens (discussed here)
44. Merlock, Onward Strides Colossus (review here)
43. Obelyskkh, The Ultimate Grace of God (review here)
42. Lord Mountain, The Oath (review here)
41. Dorthia Cottrell, Death Folk Country (review here)
40. Yawning Balch, Volume One / Volume Two (reviews here and here)
39. The Golden Grass, Life is Much Stranger (review here)
38. Somnuri, Desiderium (review here)
37. Haurun, Wilting Within (review here)
36. Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree, Aion (review here)
35. Stinking Lizaveta, Anthems and Phantoms (review here)
34. Black Rainbows, Superskull (review here)
33. Polymoon, Chrysalis (review here)
32. Fuzz Sagrado, Luz e Sombra (review here)
31. Yawning Man, Long Walk of the Navajo (review here)
Notes:
This is the third time I’m telling you not to skip this list. Linking to more on these is new. I haven’t done that before for this part of the list, but I hope it helps if you want to dig in.
That Khan stands out to me as needing to be higher given the quality of the work itself, but I got there late. But if you sent this into the year-end poll as your top 30, I feel like you wouldn’t be ‘wrong’ with some of the showings here, whether that’s the blinding shimmerprog of Polymoon, Merlock’s axe-swing sludge or Dorthia Cottrell of Windhand’s acoustic-based solo work.
Strong debut full-lengths from Haurun, Oldest Sea, Boston supergroup Blood Lightning, Cleõphüzz who already broke up, the aforementioned Merlock, mega-weirdos Codex Serafini, Slumbering Sun (kin to Monte Luna and Destroyer of Light), Church of the Cosmic Skull offshoot Massive Hassle, Turkish heavy rockers Strider and Californian metal traditionalists Lord Mountain. Established outfits like Yawning Man, Stinking Lizaveta, Cottrell, Black Rainbows, The Golden Grass, and Rotor continue to explore new avenues of their sound.
In the meantime, the respective progressions displayed by the likes of Black Helium, Fuzz Sagrado, Somnuri and Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree, the e’er-listenable Fuzz Evil and Argentinian instrumentalists Black Sky Giant offered thrills anticipated and not. Humulus bringing in Stefan Koglek from Colour Haze was a nice touch, and though I haven’t even reviewed it yet, the third and maybe-last Edena Gardens LP completes that collaborative trilogy with members of Causa Sui and Papir as fluidly as one could ask, which is only saying something because of the personnel involved.
There are a ton of others I wanted to put on this list, but numbers are cruel and if I get into decimals or fractions or something like that I’m going to end up huddled in a ball crying. But please know that because something’s not here doesn’t mean it sucked even just in my own opinion or whatever. At the end of the list come the honorable mentions and rarely have they been so honorable.
Buenos Aires trio Moodoom nailed a classic, ’70s-style Sabbathian blues rock with a non-cornball vintage feel better than anyone else I heard who tried in 2023. Their Desde el Bosque didn’t top half an hour, but you can almost feel the heat from the tubes of the amplifiers behind it, and it’s such an organic flow that it’s undeniable as an LP. Dig that creeper riff in “El Ente,” man. Proh. Toh. Doom.
The eighth full-length in a career that goes back 33 years, Zero Minus Infinity is the second Negative Reaction album since guitarist/vocalist Kenny Bones moved himself and the band from Long Island to West Virginia and revamped the lineup, and it’s a beast. It’d be here for “I’ll Have Another” alone with that crush of distortion and Bones raw-throating “It’s you I need,” on repeat, perhaps to alcohol, but that’s just one example of the disaffected delights on offer from the kings of anxiety sludge.
Downpour is one of two 2023 outings from upstart progressive Norwegian instrumentalists Kanaan, as they answered its Spring release with the jammy Diversions Vol. 2: Enter the Astral Plane. Any way you go, composed or improvised, this is a band with a special chemistry. In addition to the nodder highlight “Amazon,” which brought a collaboration with Hedwig Mollestad and the dense boogie riff-push of “Black Time Fuzz” at the start, they proceeded on an evolutionary path that looks now like it will go as long as they do. For now, in its urgency and space both, Downpour is a pinnacle achievement. How long that lasts depends on what comes next.
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27. Mathew’s Hidden Museum, Mathew’s Hidden Museum
Some records make a world. Mathew Bethancourt of Josiah, Cherry Choke, etc., put at least a solar system into the self-titled debut from his solo-project Mathew’s Hidden Museum. Melding lysergic experimentalism and off-kilter vibing with classic boogie, acoustic grunge, the piano quirk of “Golden” and more, it drew lines connecting disparate ideas and ended up making its own kind of sense, with depth enough in its layers that when I close out a week with it half a decade from now (inshallah), I’ll probably still be talking about it. Go get swallowed.
Recorded in Winter 2021/2022, Borracho‘s Blurring the Lines of Reality carried its where-did-we-go-wrong head-scratching sensibility into 2023, where to be sure it remained relevant. The Washington D.C. riffer trio know who they are and what they’re about, and their songwriting, groove and total lack of pretense continue to satisfy five records later even as the band pushes themselves further in structure and craft. And if you’d hold the social comment of their lyrics against them, first, grow up, second, your loss. Give me that smooth jam at the end of “Burning the Goddess” every time.
It was a total shock when superlatively-filth-encrusted sludgers Khanate not only returned with the surprise release of their first LP in 14 years, but that they pulled off such a remarkable change of style, abandoning their former miseries in favor of a more upbeat, uptempo outlook and poppier structures. What’s that you say? That didn’t happen? The record was just so completely, engrossingly wretched that my unconscious mind actually replaced it with something more palatable because Khanate stretch the limits of what punishment human beings can absorb in sound? Well fucking right on. That sounds like Khanate.
Oslo-based doom rockers Saint Karloff harnessed an energy that 25 years ago or so propelled the very beginnings of modern Scandinavian heavy rock and roll, and they did it as a duo paying tribute to bassist Ole Sletner as well. Rife with familiar genre elements, stoner riffing, and band-in-room vibes, and even a little cosmic prog in closer “Supralux Voyager,” Paleolithic War Crimes had its emotional crux in its celebration of song and style, and so became the successful rebound after a terrible loss. If you call yourself a fan of heavy rock, chances are there’s something for you in it.
Though they released the single-song I EP (review here) in 2018, the severely-titled Soul Murder is their first full-length since late-2016’s Blueside (review here). It puts the heavy blues frontmanship of guitarist/vocalist Mathias Northway at the fore as he, bassist Danny Smith and drummer Michael Lowe offer the most live-sounding studio effort I heard this year. Even if you go beyond the songwriting, the soul in the performances, the emotionalism and the believability of their blues, the classic warmth in their tones, the epic oil painting from Nick Keller that adorns its cover, you still have vitality (yes, even in slow parts) and the instrumental conversation happening between the members of the band. The degree of that alone warrants inclusion here.
It can be a challenge to keep up with the ongoing progression of Bergen, Norway, progressive black metal innovators Enslaved, but these 32 years on from their founding it remains worth the effort. Heimdal followed tumultuous but busy years for the band, who mostly supported 2020’s Utgard (review here) digitally for obvious reasons, and was perhaps that much freer in its experimentation as a result of the period of less live activity. However they got to the keyboard part sticking out of “Congelia,” it is only fortunate that they did, since certainly in another couple decades the rest of us might actually be on Enslaved‘s wavelength, and we’ll be glad for it. Until then, they outclass just about everyone’s everything across the board. One of the world’s best bands, outdoing themselves as ever.
Mondo Drag‘s fourth album was also their first in eight years, and with it the Oakland outfit put the lie to the stereotype that prog music is staid. Indeed, the crux of Through the Hourglass came with the passing of founding keyboardist/vocalist John Gamiño mother, in whose honor the Days of Our Lives reference in the title was made. That personal exploration of loss became a classic melancholy progressive psychedelic rocK, bolstered by a partially revamped lineup that includes bassist Conor Riley (Birth, ex-Astra) and drummer Jimmy Perez alongside the established character in the guitars of Nolan Girard and Jake Sheley (both also founding members). Likewise beautiful and sad, songs like “Passages” and “Death in Spring” resonated with the universal experience of mourning as filtered through a rich breadth of influences, memorable movements and entrancing melody. One hopes it was a comfort to Gamiño as surely it has been to others.
With shorter, tightly composed songs, Northern Ireland trio Slomatics managed to make the most atmospheric record of their career to-date. Their seventh LP, it used its time in songs like “Time Capture” and “Zodiac Arts Lab” to underscore the melody that’s been in their sound all the while but has never as much been the focus when set next to the abiding crush of David Majury and Chris Couzens‘ guitars, and though he’s behind the kit, drummer/vocalist Marty Harvey seemed all the more a frontman as his voice soared when called upon to do so. Of course, there was still plenty of time in the 36-minute run for Slomatics‘ crushall in “Wooden Satellites,” “I, Neanderthal,” later in “Voidians,” and so on, but it’s clear their range and reach have grown and their gradual evolution has brought a new level of complexity to their approach. If they keep this up, they risk feeling compelled to stop calling themselves Neanderthals, and while that would be a bummer, one very much hopes they keep it up anyway.
A new solo incarnation of Hamilton, New Zealand’s Craig Williamson — who is best known for his other one-man operation, Lamp of the Universe — the full-band-style heavy roller riffs throughout Dead Shrine‘s The Eightfold Path scratched what must have been a pretty fervent itch for heavy groove, classic swing, and fuzz, fuzz, fuzz, which cuts like “The Formless Soul,” “As Pharaohs Rise,” and side-ending self-jammers “Enshrined” and “Incantation’s Call” fortunately also have a mix spacious enough to hold. Williamson has rocked plenty since the turn of the century when he was in the heavy rock trio Datura, and around 2010 when he had the trio Arc of Ascent going. That band and this one have a lot in common, but Williamson has proven his most sustainable and seemingly preferred way of working is solo, and as one, Dead Shrine stands alongside Lamp of the Universe (wait for it…) in a way that feels like it could be longer term, even as Williamson seemed to blur the lines between the two sides on Lamp of the Universe‘s own 2023 outing…
Although they’re certainly distinct enough to be separate from each other at this point, Dead Shrine and Lamp of the Universe obviously share a lot in common and it felt right to pair them like this. Every year I give myself one ‘#a’ pick, so this is it for 2023 and I’ll just use it to say how incredibly vast Lamp of the Universe has become. While remaining loyal to its beginnings in acid folk and meditative psychedelia, Williamson‘s multi-instrumentalism, the scope of his production, and the absolute care he puts into the project have brought it beyond what reasonable expectations might’ve been. And in part, by that I mean Kaleidoscope Mind rocks. That wah solo in “Golden Dawn?” The blowout drums behind nine-minute opener “Ritual of Innerlight?” Goodness gracious, yes. Even “Immortal Rites,” which is about as close as Williamson gets to Lamp‘s beginnings here, has evolved. But it’s also still the same thing in the root. I don’t know. If you don’t stretch reality to get there, try again later. The most honest thing I can say about it is I feel lucky to be a fan.
It was the feeling that at any given point they might just go anywhere that made Sherpa‘s Land of Corals a surprise as the Italian practitioners of the psychedelic arts have thrown open the doors of both perception and microgenre and come across as thoroughly willful in their krautrock-minded ethereality, and just because the listener doesn’t know what might be next doesn’t mean the band aren’t working with a plan regardless. The follow-up to 2018’s Tigris and Euphrates (review here), the six-song/39-minute collection seemed to be fearless in what it took on, and though much of it was less serene than either of their first two outings, the divergences and the complexities in mood, ambience and arrangement render Land of Corals unto itself. Are we post-heavy here? Maybe. Still heavy as the drums behind “High Walls” show, however, though Sherpa‘s take on what that means and how that manifests is no less individualized than anything else in these tracks. Not something everyone is going to get — I’m not convinced I get it myself at this point — but an act whose creativity has yet to get its due.
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17. Gozu, Remedy
Released by Blacklight Media / Metal Blade Records. Reviewed May 18.
The Boston riff factory known as Gozu have only gotten more vicious, more pointed with time, and yet, tucked at the end of their 2023 outing, Remedy, which has them as veterans at 14 years’ tenure, are “Ash” and “The Handler” and it just goes from sweet to sweeter. Yeah, it’s a ripper into its blood with “CLDZ,” “Tom Cruise Control,” and Gozu — Marc Gaffney (vocals/guitar), Doug Sherman (guitar), Joe Grotto (bass) and Seth Botos (drums), working with producer Dean Baltulonis for a threepeat — have a brand of melody in Gaffney‘s vocals that’s all their own, and fast or slow, loud or quiet, ’80s movie reference or ’70s movie reference, Gozu have been around long enough to know what they’re about. But, after 2018’s Equilibrium (review here) and 2016’s Revival (review here), Remedy feels one step heavier. Revivalwas a great sharpening of sound. Equilibrium brought refinement to that. Remedy comes across with a little of a sense of letting go, of the band digging in where it’s more about what they can do together than the response it’ll get afterward. It suits them.
Oh, The Machine. Seven records deep and still in your 30s. That’s the advantage of starting early, which the Netherlands-based trio most definitely did. Wave Cannon, accordingly, is both masterful in its conjurations of warm heavy psychedelic fuzz, and energetic in its delivery, with founding guitarist/vocalist David Eering bid welcome to bassist Chris Both and farewell to original drummer Davy Boogaard. And where 2018’s Faceshift (review here) tipped a balance in their style toward more of a punker push, Wave Cannon led off with “Reversion” and seemed all the more purposeful in its mature heavy psychedelic delve for that. It could be Wave Cannon will be the blueprint for a settled-in aesthetic the trio now more than ever driven by Eering, or it could be the beginning of a whole new evolution of sound from the revamped three-piece recommitted to trippy sounds and warm nod. Either way, it’s not that often you talk about a band’s forward potential after seven full-lengths, so The Machine are in a pretty special place circa 2023 and Wave Cannon, whatever it leads to, is a special moment of transition captured.
Similar to how trees live in an experience of time separate from ours and the way an earth year is laughably tiny set against the scale of the universe, Chicago heavy psych rockers REZN seem to operate on their own temporal wavelength throughout their fourth album, Solace. Able to crush at will, as at the end of “Possession,” or the early going of “Stasis,” in the trades of “Reversal,” et al, Solace found REZN more confident in their dives through melody and atmosphere than even they were on 2020’s Chaotic Divine (review here), they created a space and dimensionality of sound that belongs solely to them in the style. Quieter stretches in “Webbed Roots” enthralled with their depth, and the ethereal vocals brought human presence while furthering the smoke-swirls and incense mystique. On their own terms, and yes, very much at their own pace, REZN have made themselves one of America’s most essential heavy psych bands, and Solace — joined in 2023 by REZN‘s collaboration with Mexico’s Vinnum Sabbathi, Silent Future (discussed here) — crowns their to-date discography.
I’m not saying I think it’s cool to write songs about serial killers, but if you’re going to listen to a Church of Misery release almost 30 years after bassist Tatsu Mikami started the band, chances are you know their stated theme is nothing if not consistent. Born Under a Mad Sign delivered on its promise of memorable doom riffs, and as the songwriter and figurehead for arguably Japan’s most influential doom export, Mikami acted as ringmaster while returning vocalist Kazuhiro Asaeda brought mapcap intensity (and fun) to the grooves fostered through Yukito Okazaki‘s guitar, Tatsu‘s bass and Toshiaki Umemura‘s swinging drums. As ever, loyalty and reverence to Black Sabbath are at the core of Church of Misery‘s everything, and in that sphere, there are very, very few humans walking the planet who can do the thing as well as Tatsu. Like, maybe four going on five. As such, regardless of the subject matter (something I can say because I don’t know anyone who’s been murdered) and some eight years after their preceding long-player, Church of Misery are essential as the vehicle for that.
I’m not sure if in 2015 when Boston’s Kind released their first album, Rocket Science (review here), anyone would have guessed there would even be a third full-length from them, let alone one that so much typifies the personality the band has built for itself. Comprised of the otherwise-plenty-busy lineup of vocalist Craig Riggs (also Sasquatch‘s drummer and so constantly touring), guitarist Darryl Shepherd (ex-Milligram, Blackwolfgoat, Test Meat, scores of others), bassist Tom Corino (Rozamov) and drummer Matt Couto (Aural Hallucinations, ex-Elder), Kind have found a sound that is separate from what its component members have done on their own, and become a genuinely more-than-sum-of-parts grouping. Whether it’s the rush of “Power Grab” or the way the rhythm of “What it is to Be Free” seemed to gain so much extra punch, or “Massive” at the record’s center earning its name in tone and swing alike. The “whoa baby come on” at 1:56 into that song is of course the reason Close Encounters made this list, but rest assured that across the span Kind are at what is a thus-far peak of their powers.
Stay with me here, because as you scroll further down this post, you’re going to see that Iron Jinn‘s hour-long 2LP first offering, declaratively-titled Iron Jinn, is my pick for debut album of 2023. Born out of an initial onstage collaboration at Roadburn 2018 (review here), the Arnheim, Netherlands-based four-piece brings together guitarist/vocalists Oeds Beydals (Molassess, ex-Death Alley, ex-The Devil’s Blood) and Wout Kemkens (Shaking Godspeed) with the labyrinth-constructing rhythm section of bassist Gerben Bielderman (Pronk, etc.) and drummer Bob Hogenelst, and from the late pointed lead lines of “Truth is Your Dagger” acting in duly jabbing fashion to the heady ambient drama of “Bread and Games” and the dark-prog atmospheres fleshed out as a backdrop to the melodies of “Soft Healers” and “Blood Moon Horizon,” the all-corners turns of “Lick it or Kick It,” on and on and on, the album resounds with both scope and ambition. What the long-term story of this project will be, I have no idea, but Iron Jinn is a record that brings new ideas to a sphere that very much needs them, and if there’s any luck, it will prove influential in the coming years.
Let the record show that when tasked with the biggest moment of their career to this point, Green Lung absolutely stepped up to meet it. This Heathen Land, as their first full-length with Nuclear Blast‘s backing (and third overall), will be the point of introduction for what will gradually become the bulk of their audience, and in its occult lyrics, sweeping, unironic, all-in grandiosity, weight of tone and craft of hooks, it tells you everything you need to know about why and how Green Lung got to where they are (save perhaps touring). Their task from here will be to find and refine the balance between metal and rock in their sound, but for a band whose clear intention from the outset was to take on the world to bring themselves to a point where they’re arguably doing so at least as regards the heavy underground is an accomplishment in itself. Then you get to songs like “Maxine (Witch Queen)” and the over-the-top finale “Oceans of Time,” and if you can let yourself have a little fun every now and again with your doom and witches and whatnot, this one was just about irresistible.
The album that boldly asked if it needed to be a wizard to earn your love, the fifth long-player from volume/tone/devil-worshiping (and perhaps in that order) Polish doomcrafters Dopelord was not at all the first heavy record to use Satan as a political statement — specifically in this case about social oppression in their home country and the political power of the catholic church there — but they wielded their rebel-angel argument with already-in-your-head songs like “Night of the Witch,” “The Chosen One,” “One Billion Skulls,” “Evil Spell” and the upped nastiness of “Worms,” in other words each and every of the non-intro/outro tracks, with emergent mastery and a plod that was as clear and infectious a call to praise as I heard in 2023, no less for its melodicism than its heft or the crispness of its delivery, the guttural rasps of “Worms” aside, which swapped in vitriol at just the right time. Songs for Satan was a new level for Dopelord‘s approach and as much an epistemological fuckoff to fundamentalism as it was consuming nod, and there was none more righteous in their cause. At the risk of saying the quiet part loud, dudes are going to be copping riffs from it for years.
Returning with their fourth long-player, Swedish trio Domkraft have found the style they’ve been working toward all along. As with some of the others on this list, it’s not that Sonic Moons was such a radical departure. It wasn’t. They worked with the same production team that helmed their 2022 Ascend/Descend (review here) split with Slomatics as well as 2021’s Seeds (discussed here). Björn Atldax‘s cover art was on point and in keeping with their visual aesthetic. But there’s a spaciousness on Sonic Moons in “Downpour” and amid the intensity of crash in “Stellar Winds,” and their sound has grown to become dynamic enough that as nine-minute leadoff “Whispers” pushed through its crescendo it seemed to get more and more physically forceful as part of the process. Couple that with assured writing and performances from bassist/vocalist Martin Wegeland, guitarist Martin Widholm and drummer Anders Dahlgren, and Domkraft honed in on an evolved cosmic noise rock and were unafraid to incorporate elements of psychedelia, space and classic stoner riffing into a definitive statement of their purpose.
Ukrainian progressive heavy rockers Stoned Jesus released a career album this year. Did you catch it? Restricted from touring as their home country continues to struggle against a Russian invasion that’s been ongoing for, well, a decade, but more intensely for the better part of the last two years, Stoned Jesus offered something different across each of Father Light‘s six tracks. From the catchy strums of “CON” to the only-timely-but-written-earlier “Thoughts and Prayers” and the you-want-riff-here’s-your-riff 11-minute neckroll of “Season of the Witch,” they proved once again to be a more diverse and thoughtful act than they’re almost ever given credit for being. Expanded stylistically from 2018’s Pilgrims (review here), Stoned Jesus — guitarist/vocalist Igor Sydorenko, bassist/backing vocalist Sergii Sliusar and drummer Dmytro Zinchenko — toyed with retroism on “Thoughts and Prayers” while the late solo in “Get What You Deserve” underscores the sentiment in that climate-change-themed finisher, all the while standing astride their own material, solid, confident, still looking forward. It’s the world that’s the problem, not the band.
First of all, I stand by the review. To expand on that (and the review itself was expanded on here), it was the songwriting that kept me coming back to the second album from Washington trio Kadabra, who progressed on all fronts from their already-impressive 2021 debut, Ultra (review here). They made hooks like “The Serpent” and “The Devil” feel like landmarks in a record-long horror feature that’s told as much in riffs as lyrics, but at the same time there’s nothing fancy happening in terms of sound. Some organ in “Mountain Tamer,” plenty of fuzz throughout, and the songs. It’s the songs. The songs. The fucking songs. That uplift in “Midnight Hour.” The feeling of oh-shit-we’ve-arrived in “The Serpent.” Playing toward some of Uncle Acid‘s lyrical creep with tight-knit grooves and sharp turns, Umbra not only showed the preceding LP wasn’t a fluke, it conveyed mood and atmosphere without giving up momentum or structure, and every move it made, from the shimmer opening “White Willows” to the last strains underscoring the chorus of “The Serpent” in the concluding acoustic reprise “The Serpent II,” Kadabra‘s sophomore outing communed with genre with a perspective becoming increasingly its own. And again, the songs.
There was a while there where I honestly didn’t think Dozer were ever going to do another record, so Drifting in the Endless Void is a life event as far as I’m concerned. The trailblazing Swedish heavy rockers have been playing live periodically for the last decade, and word has been kicking around of studio work, new songs following what was until this year their most recent album in 2008’s Beyond Colossal (featured here), but to actually have such a thing manifest and take the form it did made it a reinvigoration of Dozer‘s sound and what seemed to be a chance to try both new and old methods of working. In the raging “Ex-Human, Now Beast” and the breadth of “Missing 13,” Dozer reminded older heads. and showed a generation that’s come up since, why they’ve had the influence they have over the last quarter-century, including in their absence. Realize you’re lucky to be on the planet with it.
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5. Mars Red Sky, Dawn of the Dusk
Released by Vicious Circle Records and Mrs Red Sound. Reviewed Dec. 7.
A fifth full-length brought fresh ideas and new perspectives to the established progressive, melodic heavy psychedelic rock methodology of Bordeaux’s Mars Red Sky, who’ve greeted their maturity as a band with creative openness rather than stagnation. To be sure, guitarist/vocalist Julien Pras, bassist Jimmy Kinast and drummer Mathieu “Matgaz” Gazeau — each crucial to the group as they are — have plenty of recognizable aspects for longtime fans. Indeed, their signature blend of warm but remarkably heavy tonality and floating melodic vocals remains unflinching, but what they do with it has changed. And that’s not just set up for mentioning the Queen of the Meadow collaboration either (more below), glorious as Helen Ferguson‘s contributions to “Maps of Inferno” are (she’s also on the closing reprise “Heavenly Bodies”), or that Jimmmy takes a lead vocal on “The Final Round.” You can hear the progression in “Break Even,” in the expanses of “Carnival Man,” that groove in “Slow Attack,” and even the spaciousness around the lurch of “A Choir of Ghosts.” Fast or slow, loud or quiet, even the interludes here shine with a sense of purpose, and if e’er forward is to be the course of Mars Red Sky for hopefully a long time to come, so much the better.
I will not mince words. This has been a difficult, taxing year for me personally and emotionally, and anytime I felt like I wanted to beat my head into the wall — which has been A LOT — Seattle bringers of chicanery-laced heavy punk-metal Sandrider were ready to go along for the ride. Working as ever with producer Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Isis, a small city’s worth of others), guitarist/vocalist Jon Weisnewski (who also released a killer record this year with his experimental grind/weirdo project Nuclear Dudes; don’t skip), bassist/vocalist Jesse Roberts and drummer Nat Damm wound at mostly high speed through energy summoned from a place I’ve clearly never been with songs that, while they were smashing all your favorite everything to tiny bits, left a memorable impression behind as bruises in the shape of themselves and ended up with enough bounce so that cuts like “Alia,” “Weasel” (the delivery of, “Here comes the mouth/Look at all its teeth”) the their-version-of-epic-and-that’s-pretty-epic “Ixion,” “Circles,” “Grouper,” the title-track, were fun in doing so. It’s their fourth record and I don’t know if there are a ton of surprises, but I sure was happy when it came along and kicked so much ass in such a specific and, for me, helpful way. A catharsis record, but don’t take that to mean it’s just angry. There’s a lot of humor here as well and the songs are a blast. Hard to imagine this isn’t what Sandrider had in mind when they set out over a decade ago.
A breakthrough in craft and style, and immaculate in its turns, tight-but-not-choked arrangements, and willingness to go and be in unexpected spaces, Elektrik Ram was for South African heavy rockers Ruff Majik — comprised of guitarist/vocalist Johni Holiday, bassist Jimmy Glass, guitarist/backing vocalist Cowboy Bez and drummer Steven Bosman — a rare realization of potential. I said as much in the review. Not every band gets to make a record like this. From the charge of its title-track and “Hillbilly Fight Song” and the unspeakable catchiness that begins there and threads throughout the stylistic shifts of “She’s Still a Goth,” “Cement Brain,” “Delirium Tremors” — on the 15th anniversary reissue, maybe bring the triangle down in the mix? (kidding; it’s painful and should be) — and into the broader grooves of its ending section with “A Song About Drugs (With a Clever Title),” “Shangrilah Inc.” and the raw-emotive “Chemically Humanized,” which when set against the oh-look-I-just-beat-your-ass thematic of “Hillbilly Fight Song” feels duly brought low. This is a great — yes, great — album, and I don’t think I listened to anything as much this year as I listened to it. They’ve already started work on their next LP, reportedly, and I worry it’s soon, but with the kind of control over their approach that they demonstrate here, there’s really no choice but to trust they know what they’re doing, since that is so much the underlying message in the material, even if its lyrical themes were by and large much darker.
It wasn’t exactly a secret that Howling Giant had momentum and progression on their side. They’ve toured hard the last couple years, offered the instrumental Alteration EP (review here) in 2021 following their oh-shit-these-guys-are-for-real split with Sergeant Thunderhoof, Masamune/Muramasa (review here), and back to their debut LP, 2019’s The Space Between Worlds (review here), and have worked so diligently to engage their audience that a sense of reachout has become part of their sound. You knew that when they next set themselves to making a long-player, there was a real chance for them to sculpt something special, but Glass Future was still a surprise. Unflinching in its construction, mixed for brightness as well as weight, and cutting through that with clearly-schooled harmonies between guitarist Tom Polzine, drummer Zach Wheeler and bassist Sebastian “Seabass” Baltes to give a pop-ish sensibility to progressive sounds that in other hands would serve far more self-indulgent ends. Received as a whole work with its timely endtimes lyrical foundation, it exuded welcome in the hooks of “Siren Song,” “Hawk in a Hurricane,” “Glass Future,” “Sunken City,” “Juggernaut” and the periodic slowdowns through “Aluminum Crown,” “Tempest, and the Liar’s Gateway” and the closer “There’s Time Now,” which called back to the Twilight Zone reference (Simpsons did it) in intro “Hourglass” while fleshing out a brilliantly melodic comedown for the human species. As with the finest of any year’s releases, it will hold its relevance far past the coming January, and for Howling Giant, it sets them on a path of fresh ideas and expansive sound, filtered through a cohesive process to be the engaging good-time apocalypse they’ve become. Glass Future makes Howling Giant one of America’s most essential heavy rock bands and figureheads for a generation still on the rise.
There was never another choice, and not much choice to start with. The manner in which founding guitarist/vocalist Lori S. revamped her band, bringing in bassist/synthesist Bryce Shelton (Nik Turner’s Hawkwind) and drummer Jason Willer (Jello Biafra’s Guantanamo School of Medicine) as the rhythm section supporting the band’s trademark rolling fuzz, and collaborating with Black Cobra‘s Jason Landrian, who added guitar and synth to the tracks, was an expansion and redirection of sound that simply wasn’t anticipated from a band closing in on three decades of activity. But after 2015’s still-undervalued Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere (discussed here, review here), saw Lori and her then-lineup explore more heavy psychedelic sounds, Beyond Vision expanded on that with atmospheres never before conjured by any incarnation of Acid King, and Billy Anderson‘s production, as ever, allowed for scope and claustrophobia to exist in the same aural space. Hypnotic in the riffs of year-highlight “Mind’s Eye” and its penultimate title-track, Beyond Vision freely incorporated an influence from Author and Punisher into the slow plods of “Electro Magnetic” and the huge-in-a-new-way-for-them “90 Seconds,” tripped out easy on the roundly immersive opener “One Light Second Away” and galloped to a (again, surprisingly) rousing finish in “Color Trails.” A band you thought was a known quantity, whose sound you thought was set, showing that creativity doesn’t have to stop just because you have an established sound or are known for doing one thing. Acid King are still Acid King on Beyond Vision, but the boldness with which the album is realized and the sheer bravery of taking the risks it takes in pushing beyond (oh!) what were the parameters of Acid King‘s trailblazing, mellow-psych-informed stoner riffing — always possible it would fall flat in ways it obviously very much doesn’t — came together on a level that was simply unmatched in 2023. Acid King have perhaps never been more royal, more regal as they unfurl these seven cosmic triumphs, but somehow underneath they’re still punk rock. One way or the other, that the on-paper concept of Beyond Vision — all the changes, growth, shifts — winds up secondary to the strength and listening experience of the songs themselves makes it undeniable as the album of the year. It was a no-doubter.
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The Top 60 Albums of 2023: Honorable Mention
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I could very easily do another top 60 with these, and then some. Alphabetically:
1782, Abanamat, Acid Magus, Ahab, Albinö Rhino, Ananda Mida, Astral Sleep, Bell Witch, Benthic Realm, Bismut, Black Helium, Black Rainbows, Blood Ceremony, Blood Lightning, Bong Corleone, Bongzilla, Bridge Farmers, Cavern Deep, Cleõphüzz, Cloud Catcher, Clouds Taste Satanic, Danava, Darsombra, Dead Feathers, Deadpeach, Delco Detention, Desert Storm, Dommengang, Doom Lab, Dr. Space, Earthbong, Ecstatic Vision, David Eugene Edwards, End of Hope, Avi C. Engel, Fin del Mundo, Fire Down Below, The Fizz Fuzz, Formula 400, Fuzz Evil, Gévaudan, Ghorot, Giöbia, Godflesh, Godsleep, Graveyard, The Gray Goo, Green Yeti, Hail the Void, Haurun, Healthyliving, Hexvessel, Hope Hole, Humulus, IAH, Iron Void, JAAW, Jack Harlon & the Dead Crows, Katatonia, La Chinga, Lamassu, Larman Clamor, L’Ira del Baccano, Love Gang, Lucid Void, Maggot Heart, The Magpie, Mammatus, Mammoth Caravan, Mansion, Margarita Witch Cult, Masheena, Melody Fields, Melt Motif, Merlock, Minnesota Pete Campbell, Mizmor, Moon Coven, Moonstone, Morag Tong, Morass of Molasses, Morne, The Moth, Mountain of Misery, Mouth, Mudness, Mud Spencer, Los Mundos, Mutoid Man, Natskygge, Nebula Drag, Nuclear Dudes, Obelyskkh, Conny Ochs, Øresund Space Collective, Orsak:Oslo, Patriarchs in Black, Plainride, Primordial, Restless Spirit, Ritual King, The River, Robots of the Ancient World, Rocky’s Pride & Joy, Royal Thunder, Runway, Sadus The Smoking Community, SÂVER, Seum, Siena Root, Slowenya, Smokey Mirror, Evert Snyman, Sonic Moon, Sorcia, Spidergawd, Spotlights, Surya Kris Peters, Swan Valley Heights, These Beasts, Thousand Vision Mist, Thunder Horse, Tidal Wave, Tortuga, Travo, Treedeon, Trevor’s Head, Unsafe Space Garden, Vlimmer, Warp, Westing, Wet Cactus, Witch Ripper, WyndRider, Yakuza, Zone Six, and apparently frickin’ everything that Dr. Space touches.
Notes:
Certainly a landmark year for Blues Funeral and Magnetic Eye, while Ripple Music, Heavy Psych Sounds, Small Stone, Kozmik Artifactz, Napalm, Sound Effect, Spinda, Mongrel Records and Exile on Mainstream fostered a deeply admirable swath of sounds. If you’re not following these however you do your following — email lists, social media, Bandcamp, etc. — I suggest in a spirit of friendship that you consider doing so.
A couple thoughts before we wrap the big list. First, I harbor no delusions that it’s complete. There always are and always will be records that slip by me. I’m one person running this site. I’ll never be able to hear everything, appreciate everything I do hear to the utmost as everyone else might, or even want to. This is my list, my listening habits for the year and what I thought were 2023’s best full-length releases. If you’d put more in it than that, go look at the headline again. It’s a list. I take it seriously, of course, but if you had Swan Valley Heights or Godflesh or La Chinga at number three on your list — all of which are totally valid picks, just like the rest — and I didn’t, that’s okay.
In fact, it’s beautiful, but it doesn’t always come out that way in the discussion. I’m asking as I do every year to please keep opinions and conversations civil in their presentation. I know arguing on the internet is fun but I’d rather not have the drama and rest assured, I take it all personally.
So, about the honorable mentions: where do you even start? While the balance of the main list, the top 60, is toward established and even veteran acts, it’s encouraging to see so many up and coming groups forcing their way into consideration. From the ambient evocations of Orsak:Oslo to Sorcia’s thick sludge and Melt Motif’s sultry industrializations, Mountain of Misery branching off from Spaceslug, outfits like IAH and Swan Valley Heights finding new maturity, Mammoth Caravan bring aggro edge to huge tones, Healthyliving, Merlock, Morag Tong, Godsleep, These Beasts, Margarita Witch Cult, Warp, Earthbong, Abanamat, Runway, WyndRider, Trevor’s Head, Fire Down Below, High Priest, Nebula Drag, The Magpie, Love Gang, Jack Harlon and others, a slew of impressive debuts and second albums, the generational evolution of sound is ongoing, vibrant, bands establishing themselves and claiming their aesthetic place and respective audiences as we speak. I would urgently encourage you to engage with these artists now, both for immediate satisfaction and as investment in the shape of heavy music to come, which they will make.
The bottom line is this: I believe deeply in the power of art to affect your life, to make it richer, fuller, better. There are mornings when The Obelisk is the reason I’m getting out of bed, and I thank you for reading, for being a part of this. I’ll say more later. We still have a ways to go.
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Debut Album of the Year 2023
Iron Jinn, Iron Jinn
Other notable debuts (alphabetical):
Altered States, Survival
Astral Hand, Lords of Data
Benthic Realm, Vessel
Blood Lightning, Blood Lightning
Bog Monkey, Hollow
Bong Corleoone, Bong Corleone
Cleõphüzz, Dune Altar
Codex Serafini, The Imprecation of Anima
Daevar, Delirious Rights
Dead Shrine, The Eightfold Path
Deer Lord, Dark Matter Pt. 1
Dread Witch, Tower of the Severed Serpent
Ego Planet, Ego Planet
Embargo, High Seas
From the Ages, II
Fuzzy Grapes, Volume 1
Haurun, Wilting Within
Hibernaut, Ingress
HIGH LEAF, Vision Quest
High Priest, Invocation
Inherus, Beholden
JAAW, Supercluster
The Keening, Little Bird
King Potenaz, Goat Rider
Lord Mountain, The Oath
Margarita Witch Cult, Margarita Witch Cult
Massive Hassle, Massive Hassle
Mammoth Caravan, Ice Cold Oblivion
Medicine Horse, Medicine Horse
Merlock, Onward Strides Colossus
Milana, Milvus
Mountain of Misery, In Roundness
Ockra, Gratitude
Oldest Sea, A Birdsong, a Ghost
Pyre Fyre, Pyre Fyre
Runway, Runway
Slow Wake, Falling Fathoms
Strider, Midnight Zen
WyndRider, WyndRider
Slumbering Sun, The Ever-Living Fire
Sonic Moon, Return Without Any Memory
Tō Yō, Stray Birds From the Far East
Tribunal, The Weight of Remembrance
Weite, Assemblage
Notes:
Tell your friends. I think what I like most about that glut of names just above is that there’s a full spectrum of sounds there. Yeah, it’s all under an umbrella of expanded-definition heavy, but that’s the point too. A creative boom is happening that’s seeing the post-Gen X and the earlier end of the Millennials making room for newer acts with new ideas and perspectives.
Why did I pick Iron Jinn as debut of the year, when there was obviously so much otherwise to choose from? Easy. It was the most its own thing out of any of these releases. I love Dead Shrine, Blood Lightning’s intensity speaks to my brain in a way not everything can, Margarita Witch Cult have been building buzz all year. Oldest Sea’s debut is a melancholic declaration of arrival. I was not short on choices, and I’ll probably keep adding to this list as the next week or so goes on.
Dark, heavy, progressive in its approach and complex enough that I still feel like I’m getting to know it, Iron Jinn‘s self-titled so much brimmed with purpose that it seemed to go beyond a first record. My hope, honestly, is that Oeds Beydals and Wout Kemkens spend the next 30 years or so refining that collaboration and exploring where it can go, because if this is the starting point, it’s got enough to it to be the beginning of a lifetime’s exploring. One never knows how things will work out when songwriters work together, but clearly Iron Jinn drew from the strengths of all its members. Records like this, on the unlikely occasion they happen at all, don’t happen by accident.
And yes, Iron Jinn are a new band not necessarily comprised of inexperienced players, but most bands start from members of other bands. Blood Lightning, Slumbering Sun, Weite, Mountain of Misery, JAAW, Ego Planet, Massive Hassle, all the way back up to Benthic Realm and Altered States. New bands, new sounds, new ideas all coming to the fore. Couple that with acts like WyndRider, Daevar, Lord Mountain, Hibernaut, Oldest Sea, Mammoth Caravan, Sonic Moon, Tō Yō, Medicine Horse, High Priest and others here whose members haven’t necessarily appeared in an Obelisk year-end post before, and you get a more complete picture of the churning magma that is the potential for the heavy underground over the rest of the 2020s and hopefully beyond.
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Short Release of the Year 2023
Mars Red Sky & Queen of the Meadow, Mars Red Sky & Queen of the Meadow
Other notable EPs, Splits, Demos, Singles, etc.
Aawks, Luna EP
Aawks & Aiwass, The Eastern Scrolls Split LP
Apollo80 & Dimartis, Reverberations Vol. 1: Tales of Dust and Winds Split LP
Beastwars, Tyranny of Distance EP
Black Glow, Black Glow EP
Bloodsports, Bloodsports EP
Book of Wyrms, Storm Warning Single
Borracho, Kozmic Safari Single
The Bridesmaid, Come on People Now Smile on Your Brother
Burning Sister, Get Your Head Right EP
Cervus, Shifting Sands
Familiars, Keep the Good Times Rolling EP
The Freqs, Poacher
Grin, Black Nothingness EP
Guided Meditation Doomjazz, Expect EP
High Desert Queen & Blue Heron, Turned to Stone Ch. 8: The Wake Split LP
The Holy Nothing, Volume I: A Profound and Nameless Fear EP
Iress, Solace EP
Josiah, rehctaW EP
Kal-El, Moon People EP
Kombynat Robotron & DUNDDW, Split LP
Lammping, Better Know Better EP
Monolord, It’s All the Same EP
Mordor Truckers, Nowhere
Nerver & Chat Pile, Brothers in Christ Split
Night Fishing, Live Bait EP
Oxblood Forge, Cult of Oblivion
Zack Oakley, Demon Run / Funkier Than a Mosquito’s Tweeter EP
Severed Satellites, Aphelion EP
Space Queen, Nebula EP
Speck & Interkosmos, Split LP
Stöner, Boogie to Baja EP
Suspiriorium, Suspiriorum EP
Trillion Ton Beryllium Ships, Destination Ceres Station: Reefersleep EP
Ufomammut, Crookhead EP
Vokonis, Exist Within Light EP
Weedevil & Electric Cult, Cult of Devil Sounds Split LP
The Whims of the Great Magnet, Same New Single
Notes:
In keeping with their history of releasing EPs ahead of their LPs, Mars Red Sky this Spring offered the Mars Red Sky & Queen of the Meadow short outing as a preface to Dawn of the Dusk (number five on the big list), but with just three songs it became one of the releases I listened to most this year. I had “Maps of Inferno” on repeat to a degree that was kind of embarrassing to me even in front of family, and since the EP was basically that, the companion “Out at Large,” which isn’t on the full-length, and an edit that cuts out most of the trippy midsection of “Maps of Inferno” so that it all the more hammers groove into your head in what drummer Matgaz very kindly explained to me was 4/4 timing with three extra beats. Good luck following along to his kick on what seems like such a straightforward nod. What a band. I’m not doing a separate section for it, but “Maps of Inferno” was also hands-down my song of the year.
You can see above, it’s a pretty broad mix, both of release types, of new and older acts, and of styles. I’ve been hailing Vokonis’ better-future queer prog-doom on the regular, and Josiah, Monolord and Ufomammut’s EPs were nothing if not listenable. I dug the first outing from Suspiriorum (mems. Destroyer of Light and more) and hope they continue to flesh out their cult-horror ambience, and Severed Satellites’ (mems. Sixty Watt Shaman, etc.) jams set just right in their Marylander groove. Lammping will likely be on some list of mine until they break up — I’m hooked — and Zack Oakley’s funk also resonated. From the warm heavy psych of Cervus to The Bridesmaid’s all-in-on-far-out experimentalism, a victory lap from Stöner after two quality LPs and the High Desert Queen and Blue Heron split that’s another landmark in Ripple’s ongoing ‘Turned to Stone’ series, it’s been a good year if you’re willing to be distracted bouncing from one thing immediately to the next, which apparently I am.
It’s no coincidence Aawks are on the list twice, and I haven’t reviewed that Black Glow EP yet (it’s in the next Quarterly Review), but it’s a gem as well. Also very interested to see where The Freqs go as a new voice in heavy rock from Boston, and Night Fishing (mems. Abrams) feel like they’re just starting to find what they’re looking for, but this year was also their first and second releases, so they’re on their way. Grin’s assault was furious, and Beastwars always tick that box as well. I continue to dig the vibe of Trillion Ton Beryllium Ships and look forward to more from them, and same goes for both DUNDDW and Bloodsports here, as well as both Apollo80 and Dimartis on that split. Burning Sister took advantage of an opportunity to expand on their sound, and their take on Mudhoney’s “When Tomorrow Comes” was overflowing with love for the source material. If you can’t get behind a band being fans, I’m not sure what we’re doing here.
Because a ‘short release’ can be so much, I won’t call this list complete. If you have a single you loved, or an EP or split or anything else of the sort, and you don’t see it above, please just leave a comment. Maybe I left off something crucial. Maybe you can put me onto something awesome I didn’t hear. I’ll take it either way, and only ask again please be kind.
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Live Album of the Year
Ecstatic Vision, Live at Duna Jam
Other notable live albums:
The Atomic Bitchwax, Live at Freak Valley
Causa Sui, Loppen 2021
Dool, Visions of Summerland
Duel, Live at Hellfest
Edena Gardens, Live Momentum
King Buffalo, Live at Burning Man
Messa, Live at Roadburn
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Live in NY
Rainbows Are Free, Heavy Petal Music
Sacri Monti, Live at Sonic Whip
Temple Fang, Live at Freak Valley
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, Slaughter on First Avenue
Villagers of Ioannina City, Through Space and Time
Notes:
This isn’t a huge list, but it’s burners front to back, and in that regard there’s little in the heavy underground, certainly toward the maddened-space-psych end of it, that can touch Ecstatic Vision’s intense performance ethic. If they’re not yet, I firmly believe the Philadelphia outfit led by guitarist/vocalist Doug Sabolick (also guitar for Author & Punisher) are on their way to having their reputation as a live band precede them, and Live at Duna Jam is further evidence that it should. Issued through Heavy Psych Sounds, it both captured the four-piece’s ultra-dead-on cosmic blast, but it paired that with the theatre-of-the-mind romance of Duna Jam itself; the best-kept-secret-in-heavy week-long unofficial festival held each year in Sardinia is the ultimate escapist daydream. That combination was just too powerful to ignore.
King Buffalo’s surprise Live at Burning Man release will do well to hold over till their next full-length, and I’ll just tell you flat out that no home should be without Causa Sui’s Loppen 2021. Uncle Acid’s first live outing was somewhat obligatory but welcome, and Messa’s Live at Roadburn celebrated the emergence of that genre-blending Italian unit as one of the most essential up and coming bands in Europe. They also made their first appearance on North American shores this year. One suspects it won’t be their last.
I’ll be very much anticipating what’s next from Sacri Monti, Duel, Causa Sui (of course), Temple Fang and actually the rest on this list, which leads us to…
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Looking Ahead to 2024
You’re almost there. Just keep going. Special thanks to the folks in The Obelisk Collective on Facebook for the help on rounding up this hopefully-alphabetized list of names:
10,000 Years, Acid Mammoth, Apostle of Solitude, Big Scenic Nowhere, Bismarck, Blue Heron, Castle Rat, Coogans Bluff, Crystal Spiders, Curse the Son, Deer Creek, DVNE, Foot, Full Earth, Fu Manchu, Greenleaf, Hashtronaut, Heavy Temple, High on Fire, Horseburner, Iota, Ironrat, King Buffalo, Kungens Män, Lamassu, Mammoth Caravan, Mammoth Volume, Maragda, Mario Lalli & The Rubber Snake Charmers, Monarch, Monkey3, Moura, My Diligence, The Obsessed, Orange Goblin, Psychlona, Red Mesa, Rhino, Ruff Majik, Sacri Monti, Sasquatch, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Slift, Slomosa, Spirit Mother, Stonebride, Troy the Band, Ufomammut, Unida, Vitskär Süden, Vokonis, Weedpecker, and just because they should probably be on this list every year until a new record comes out if one ever actually does: Om.
If you’ve got names here too, the more the merrier, comment button is below.
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THANK YOU
This has not been a minor undertaking, whether or not you count the fact that I started keeping notes for 2023 in 2022, just like right now I’ve already got notes going for 2024. It never stops. But every year, I feel like this is among the most important things this site puts out and I use these lists all the time for reference, looking back on what was happening where and when, what came out when, etc. I hope you also find something useful here. I don’t have an exact count, but just by estimate there are at least somewhere between 200-300 bands talked above above. It’s a lot. It’s overwhelming. But I hope you can find something that sounds like it’s speaking directly to you, because I know that I have several times over. Any one of my top five picks I consider an ‘album of the year,’ if that’s a decent place to start.
Thank you to The Patient Mrs. for her support, love and inexplicable willingness to put up with my crap. Right this second, she is keeping our daughter hooked into a going-late morning loaf in bed I think specifically until I get up from the couch, go in the other room, and declare I’m about to start The Pecan’s breakfast, which I probably should’ve done like an hour ago. I am luckier than I am able most days to realize, and I’m working on that, and it is the beauty and flat-out amazing nature of the two people with whom I share our home that is the reason why it’s worth that effort.
I’m sure I said as much above, but I believe in art. I believe in creativity. I believe these things are a path to fulfillment that lives without them do not experience. There are ups and downs to everything, and any glorious creative individual is just as likely to be their own worst critic, but isn’t that still worth it too? Don’t we move forward anyway, because what’s the other choice?
I thank you for reading a lot. I’ll do it again now: Thanks for reading. Your support is the reason this site is still here. It’s why it’s worth it to me to take hours from days stretched across the better part of a week (I actually finished early, thanks again to The Patient Mrs.) to do this in the first place, let alone entertain the notion of doing so again next December and on into some unknown measure of perpetuity.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you’re seeing these words, I wish you and yours the best of everything for fucking ever, and cannot begin to tell you how much I value your time and willingness to spend it here.
Taking tomorrow off, but after that, we go as ever: onward.
[Click play above to stream Yawning Man’s Long Walk of the Navajo in full. It’s out Friday on Heavy Psych Sounds and available to preorder here (US) and here (EU).]
A true headphone album. A record you can put on, close your eyes, and drift away with, the sounds floating and swirling and changing shape like passing clouds over a sun-beat landscape, old rocks telling stories about time no one can hear in rusts and beiges and greens and browns. A record with which to wander. And maybe that’s what Yawning Man wanted. Long Walk of the Navajo references in its title the Civil War-era forced migration of Navajo peoples from the territory of what is now Arizona, part of the larger genocide of indigenous Americans that continued well into and through the 20th Century, wherein the US military marched members of the tribe some 300 miles to New Mexico. Hundreds died or had their lives uprooted, some were captured along the way and put into slavery, and many were just outright murdered in yet another example of the brutality of colonialism and the foundation of blood and exploitation upon which the United States was constructed, white European people enacting violence on brown American peoples with the specific goal of destroying their way of life. It is one of many such tales out of American history, and by no means a story that is over. It is a living narrative.
As regards album themes, one might engage Long Walk of the Navajo in a spirit of melancholy or mourning as a result of this context, and I won’t say that’s wrong or counter to the Yawning Man‘s intention. The long-running desert rock progenitors are as ever led by guitarist Gary Arce in their instrumentalism, and in addition to the title they note a desert storm during the recording that fostered a contemplative mood, but if they’re evoking a sense of physical movement from one place to another, specifically of forced displacement, then that movement is presented with due spaciousness, respect and emotionality. Long Walk of the Navajo is offered as three extended tracks running longest to shortest: opener/longest track (immediate points) “Long Walk of the Navajo” (15:09), “Respiratory Pause” (13;25) and “Blood Sand” (8:58), running a total of 37 minutes across two vinyl sides that together serve as the band’s sixth long-player in a 35-plus-year history, though, admittedly it wasn’t until 2005 that their first album, Rock Formations (discussed here), actually surfaced.
These songs, then, are part of the thread of the most flourishing period of Yawning Man‘s entire arc, their last studio records having been 2018’s The Revolt Against Tired Noises (review here) and 2019’s Macedonian Lines (review here), which they followed with 2020’s Live at Giant Rock (discussed here) and a series of catalog reissues through Heavy Psych Sounds that included their demo, The Birth of Sol (discussed here), as well as 2013’s Historical Graffiti (review here) and 2010’s Nomadic Pursuits (review here), and the aforementioned Rock Formations. What having this material readily available has done is to increase awareness of who Yawning Man are and what they’ve contributed to the sphere of desert rock, and in that, Long Walk of the Navajo is a reinforcement of their root approach.
The title-track, recorded by Steve Kille of Dead Meadow in Oct. 2022, is listed as being completely improvised. It begins with Bill Stinson‘s drums establishing a pattern on toms and introducing Arce‘s guitar and Billy Cordell‘s bass on the crash cymbal. The vibe is immediate, unrushed, warm, and yes, somewhat foreboding in the declining notes and the underlying subtle sprawl of the held-out bass notes. It should go without saying that Yawning Man are no strangers to jamming, but there do seem to be layers of guitar working across two channels, whether that was overdubbed or looped I couldn’t and wouldn’t guess. They are nonetheless organic in their sound as they cast breadth over the backbeat, guitars again intertwining after the change four minutes in that cuts back the wash only to rebuild it in a repeating pattern of melody that becomes a kind of central hook that comes and goes, allowing for the quintessential noodling near the song’s midpoint, the languid unfurling of drift in the back half, and the meditation on time and space both there and in the fade, the song going without fanfare to end side A, not without joy in its exploration, but subdued enough to fit the notion of getting to a place and now what.
In dynamic, “Long Walk of the Navajo” is a summary of the chemistry central to Yawning Man in any lineup incarnation. Cordell, who played on the band’s Pot Head EP in 2005 comes back to Yawning Man in place of Mario Lalli (also Fatso Jetson, The Rubber Snake Charmers, etc.), and fits easily alongside Arce and Stinson, the latter having also taken part in Arce-led side-projects like Zun, Ten East and Dark Tooth Encounter. On paper, they are a classic power trio on “Long Walk of the Navajo,” with the rhythm section acting as fluid support behind the vast reaches of Arce‘s guitar, the tone of which is a signature element of Yawning Man‘s work as well as nearly any other project in which Arce participates. For more than three and a half decades, he has brought together surf reverb, goth atmosphere and land-born scope to create a sound that is distinctive even among the hordes working under its direct influence. That sound, and the entrancing manner in which it covers so much of the mix, seeming to ring out into open air even when piped directly to one’s eardrum, is the defining feature of the band. It makes and has made them who they are. It is only right and consistent that Arce should lead here as he does.
Recorded in the early going of 2023 by Dan Joeright of Gatos Trail Recording Studio — one might recall he helmed the Live in the Mojave Desert series of streams/live albums (review here), as well as the upcoming Yawning Man/partial-Fu Manchu collaboration, Yawning Balch — “Respiratory Pause” and “Blood Sand” are then distinguished by their freshness as the most recent Yawning Man material put to tape. Cordell does a bit of wandering around the guitar line around six minutes in to “Respiratory Pause” that adds to the procession without taking away from the layers of guitar flowing above, but with Stinson holding steady on the ground, there’s little danger of the piece being any more carried into the ether than it wants to be. Like much of Yawning Man‘s current-era output, it is lush and unrepentantly gorgeous without coming across as overwrought or hackneyed, naturally immersive, consistent in character with the title-track preceding but with a gentle physicality of its own. It fades smoothly into the feedback-ghosts that accompany the launch of “Blood Sand,” a howl underscored by low-end resonance from Cordell as the bass flowers after two minutes in, complementing the guitar in the sense of adding to it, bolstering the impression of the whole.
By this time in the listening, the method is well confirmed, but the shorter closing track is still able to resolve Long Walk of the Navajo in satisfying fashion precisely because of the aural conversation happening between Arce, Cordell and Stinson. They cap with a particularly fervent wash, and, as with the two prior pieces, end in a fade, highlighting the sense of these songs as samples carved from even broader sonic expeditions. This is one of the most interesting features of Long Walk of the Navajo, since while Yawning Man have worked in long-ish forms on studio LPs before — both Macedonian Lines and The Revolt Against Tired Noises had songs over seven minutes — they’ve never gone so far as to present their audience with 15- and 13-minute long tracks, and even “Blood Sand” nearly hitting nine would otherwise be their longest studio cut to-date.
Whether this is a sign of things to come or a one-off born out of an especially productive session, I can’t and won’t speculate. The overriding message, though, is that as they approach their 40th year of existence in one form or another, Yawning Man are still finding new paths to follow. It is not every band and not every player willing to try new things on their sixth (maybe seventh?) album, and their commitment to exploration as demonstrated here is no less essential to who they are than Arce‘s echoing lead guitar melodies. Because of the longer songs, Long Walk of the Navajo would seem like it might intimidate some listeners or those taking on Yawning Man for the first time, but the reality is that their sound is all the more welcoming for its ability to reside in a part before moving onto the next. They sound vital in a ‘live’ sense, and deliver here with raw class and poise as only masters could, reconfirming their place as one of the California desert’s most crucial acts and reminding the listener why and how their influence has spread to such a degree over the last few decades. And true to form, the next one is reportedly already in the works.
“Dark Meet” and Fatso Jetson‘s “Mono Decay,” then keeps the flow going with Fatso Jetson‘s “Trans World Sleep” and Yawning Man‘s “Underwater Noise.”
