Well, not more than a month or so removed from The Atomic Bitchwax’s single-song album, The Local Fuzz — and not more than one year removed from their last album, Run Thick in the Night — comes USX and their single-song album, The Valley Path. Now, two albums doesn’t a trend make, so it would be presumptuous to proclaim 2011 the Year of the Ambitious Jam, and truth be told, The Valley Path ain’t so much a jam as it is a 39-minute stretch of psych-drone that veers slightly off course around the 14-minute mark. It’s this subtle detour, though, that transforms The Valley Path into a more inspiring journey, moving you out of a shoe-gazing stupor and into a pulse-quickening post-rock jog. Like all USX efforts, this one contains its share of eerie ambiance, but it’s overall feel is lighter and more hopeful, and thrives on an interesting combination of Earth’s aural fortitude and Greg Dulli’s sweeping, emotional grandeur. Perhaps cognizant of its own length and our willingness to travel it, The Valley Path finishes strong, rewarding us in the end with a loud, heaving groundswell of earned enlightenment.
Like an ancient call from deep within the foggy halls of some floating, forgotten, and fervent cosmic temple of metallurgy, the songs on Zoroaster’s third full-length, Matador, swim between sludge-drenched doom, nerve-rattling drone, and psych-metal mayhem, creating one bastard of a heavy, hypnotic ride. This isn’t just music you hear, buddy, this is music you see. It pulses and surges like a snake swallowing a beehive, it moves in nocturnal, amphibious rhythms, it explodes and flows like an active volcano. On previous efforts, Dog Magic and Voice of Saturn, Zoroaster stayed the low-end course of doom, rarely varying from the path of heaviest resistance, but Matador sees the Atlanta trio free-forming their way through meditative expanses of earth-swallowing sound and noise. Dig the title track, “D.N.R.,” “Odyssey” and “Old World” for the freakiest, Om meets Kyuss examples, while the songs “Ancient Ones,” “Trident,” and “Black Hole” spit out those classic Zoroaster riffs, which sound like High on Fire wallowing in a tub of fuzz. This is a potent, mesmerizing, and audacious heavy metal album, my friends, and tailor-made for anyone with a beard.
U.S. Christmas
Zoroaster