Listening to Brooklyn trio Bad Dream is like being picked up on the side of the road by a bunch of bleary-eyed strangers in a black van who just stare at you the whole hazy ride, numb to their new friend, while you’re gripping your jeans, mistaking the flash of passing headlights for the glint of a hunting knife. It’s a heavy kind of nervous energy, a fuzzy psych-doom that spins thick webs in your head, and each of the songs on this 7″ drip with sacrificial wax. Side A’s “Black Blizzard” is a carry over from their Demonstration EP, but it sounds considerably more evil this time around, while side B’s “1134″ tortures you with its medieval riffs. Bad Dream might be a tad more psychedelic than Electric Wizard but they come from the same soul-frying school, that’s for sure, and will no doubt please all the dope fiends and (bad) dreamers out there.
Note: That’s not exactly the proper cover; there’s all sorts of different coloured covers, which you can see here. I got myself the purple swirl cover on white vinyl, number 129/300. Oh, one more thing about Bad Dream…they have the best prices for merch. I got this 7″, a poster, a t-shirt, and some patches all for like $15. And that included shipping. You’d be crazy not to send ‘em some money.
Listen to “Black Blizzard”! This is actually the version from the Demonstration EP because it was all I could find, but you get the idea.
The Mountain, the new four-song 10″ from C’mon, Canada’s premiere bleary-eyed bastards of fuzz, kicks off with the longest, most ambitious song the band has ever laid down. Until now, the seven-minute track “Fortress of the Night” from 2010′s Beyond the Pale Horse held that distinction, but this here title track, which commands all of side A, clocks in just shy of 12 minutes, and reaches an epic and dangerous precipice the band had only previously admired from afar. C’mon has built an outstanding reputation as a band that can move a mountain by sheer rawk force alone, but this time they do us one better and scale the entire fucking thing in a burnt-out van, blowing dirty exhaust the entire way, planting their tattered flag at the top when they land. What they unleash on the world below is a spacey rumble of arena bravado and prog-crunch, a steady build-up of monolithic metal like a giant analog amp rising up from behind the fires of the sun. Musically, “The Mountain” is more dense and layered than anything C’mon has done in the past* and that kind of studio presence/trickery continues as the band bounds on down the back side in its usual muddy-riffed fashion, turning thrusters on high and heavy with “It’s Alright,” the wonky instrumental “The Grunge,” and a cover of The Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses,” a pretty weird beard song to begin with that is given a special kind of supercharged Blurtonian treatment here. Okay, I know you’re waiting for me to say it, so here it is: C’mon does it again.
*Singer/guitarist Ian Blurton has said in an interview that at one point in the song there are two versions of the band playing against each other, so two drum kits, two basses, and about 25 guitars, which he called a tribute to Voivod’s Piggy and Thin Lizzy’s Gary Moore.
Ok, so I’m not sure this album is entirely new, but it’s new to me, and as you’re reading this the young Canucks in Black Wizard are putting the finishing touches on the vinyl version, so that’ll be new, got it? And by finishing touches I mean they are silk screening every single goddamn record jacket. That’s instant cred right there, and not just because I have a raging boner for all things rock n’ roll and all things silk screen, but because there’s no doubt that during this awesomely messy DIY process one of ‘em will get ripped to the tits on cheap beer, lose a finger tip in a freak silk screening accident, and bleed all over the freshly painted jackets. I would kill a child with a shoe to get my hands on one of those soiled copies, let me tell you.
Bad Dream
C’mon
Black Wizard