HeavyPink Flower and Song b/w There is a Light 7″
The Maple Forum
When Mos Generator split in 2009, they were working on an album that was going to be called HeavyPink. Well, Mr. Mos himself and friend of the Beard, Tony Dallas Reed, has taken that album’s concept and name off of the shelf on which it’s sat these last few years, dusted it off, and recorded an experimental solo project. The result is this two-song EP of mystic heaviness, and we find Reed (who sang, played all the instruments, and recorded it in his own HeavyHead studios) reaching back into the foggy past yet again, only where his current band Stone Axe channels the almighty rock, HeavyPink lays down a tremulous psych-doom that sleeps in graveyards and plays in opium dens. “Flower and Song,” then, is the moonlight-bathed A-side while “There is a Light” is the red light-dusted B-side, but both contain well-fused avant-garde and goth metal elements. Reed himself explains HeavyPink’s sounds as, ‘Master of Reality, Pet Sounds, and Into the Pandemonium all in one and produced by Phil Spector,’ so let THAT permeate your brain, but to me it’s a wonderfully unexpected noir punch from a certified cosmic rock master.
Listen to “Flower and Song” from Flower and Song b/w There is a Light 7″!
Build Your Beast a Fire, the second full-length from Brooklyn band Weird Owl, carries the same folksy psychedelia over from 2009′s Ever the Silver Cord Be Loosed, but atmospherically speaking, the albums sound worlds apart. The bluesy, acid-drenched rock found on that previous album has been spread out over many a wide spaces this time around and the result is an open-armed, communal vibe, like robed choirs ’round campfires, like groups of fringed-jacket smokers under diamond skies. Build Your Beast a Fire still bubbles with a mystic amalgam of Neil Young/Crazy Horse and some lo-fi groove, but develops what I can only call a more British sound, pulling in bits of Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, and the more modern, melodic pop styling of The Stone Roses, especially on the songs “Straj Proj” and “Skin the Dawn.” There’s 15 songs in total here, with a good handful being minute-and-half-long toss asides, but what’s left showcases Weird Owl’s ability to focus their third eye a little more on the turned on, tuned in, dropped out task at hand.
Listen to “Skin the Dawn” from Build Your Beast a Fire!
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!
HeavyPink
Weird Owl
