It seems that Dwellers, the Salt Lake City trio featuring former Iota singer/guitarist Joey Toscano, thinks that, even though their debut full-length is set to be released sometime this summer on Small Stone, we ought to hear something right now, and so we get the experimental 4-song digital EP Peace, and Other Horrors, which was made during their current recording sessions. Now, I’m not sure how indicative of the upcoming album this EP is (labelling it experimental makes me think it’s going to differ quite a bit), but hopefully they end up towing a similar line because the folksy, Americana Gothic, with its slide guitar, cymbal bows, and faucet drips, makes for some ominous tones and spooky spaghetti ambiance, and calls to mind Earth’s last handful of albums and Dege Legg’s swampy ghost songs. If the goal of releasing this EP was to get me excited for the forthcoming album, then consider the mission accomplished.
Head over to Dwellers’ Bandcamp page where you can download this EP for free!
Graveyard seem to be a strange pick-up for metal label Nuclear Blast, but there were days before speed and aggression when the psychedelic blues riffs of bands like Led Zeppelin and Blue Cheer were considered heavy metal, so if you want to look at it that way, the foggy longhair tumult of the Gothenburg, Sweden quartet’s retro rock is plenty metal enough. Shaking with raw, analogous boogie-doom and acid-fried magic, Hisingen Blues, the band’s second album, is rarefied fuzzdom, a kind of electric catnip that makes bell-bottomed leaf hounds go bat-shit. Much like its self-titled predecessor, Hisingen Blues baits you into unconscious reminiscing thanks to a sound best received via vinyl’s hypnotizing spin. Although Graveyard find themselves essential players in a growing Euro-led 70s revival with bands like Witchcraft, Ghost, The Devil’s Blood, Dead Man, and Asteroid, they bypass the more flagrant ceremonial/occult vibes of some of those bands (although they’re not shy on the demonic themes) for a more straightforward rock n’ roll approach that might call to mind a candlelit version of latter-day Hellacopters. Songs like “Ain’t Fit to Live Here,” “Hisingen Blues,” “Buying Truth (Tack & Förlåt),” “Ungrateful Are the Dead,” and “RSS” are propelled by pelvic power and sorcerous solos, while songs like “No Good, Mr. Holden,” “Uncomfortably Numb,” “Longing,” and “The Siren” take a dip into murky, mystic waters, and all the while vocalist/guitarist Joakim Nilsson replies in kind with an impressive range that stretches from Plant to Pelander as the situation warrants (sometimes within the same song). I predict this one will gain a hell of a lot of traction before the year’s out, and that’s all right with me, friends, because when the weird inherit the Earth, we’ll have Graveyard to thank.
Check out the video for the title track from Hisingen Blues!
Souvenir’s Young America The Name of the Snake
Init Records
Souvenir’s Young America hollow out a small part of your mind in order to separate themselves from the dense din of all the instrumental post-rock and experimental metal out there, and in that crater they lay something so remarkably vast, so terribly scary, that a mere whisper of its presence alerts you to your certain doom. Not that the Virginia band’s latest album, The Name of the Snake, is abundantly evil, it’s just that it exudes a numbing solitude that borders on hallucination desolation. The four songs laid down here (you get three bonus tracks from their September Songs EP as well if you happen to have the CD) moan like a five-hundred-year-old desert wind, beat on the old, dry, cracked earth like a chain-gang of ghosts, and lead you on a callous, lonely walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The star of this album, however, is the harp. The heavy momentum on “Water (Forgetting the Past),” “Vanishing (Remaining),” and “Amnesia (A Victor’s History)” isn’t disrupted by the haunting harmonica that calls you home with a totem’s tongue; instead they work together in some kind of brazen, taunting harmony. The backwoods brass and cowboy harmonica of “Dust (Erasing the Future),” the album’s commandeering ballad, is for outlaws only, and captures the spirit of wide open, starry nights and circling, hungry vultures. Again, the dichotomy of hope and desperation abounds. You don’t get the same old epic, aural sound scape with SYA that you do with other bands of their ilk. What you get instead is the distinct, suffocating, and palpable feeling that the end is near. Deep, awesome stuff.
Dwellers
Souvenir’s Young America