Band interviews and album reviews. Stoner, metal, fuzz, desert, psych, instrumental, doom music.
The new stoner metal album "Order, Chaos, Life and Death" from Chile's DIXIE GOAT rocks so hard it makes my head hurt! And that's the whole point! This trio keeps it fresh with every track sounding unique, and the overall effect is a fantastic album. There's a layer of keyboards, too, and they are put to good use. Start listening with a code below!
SPACELORD drops their new album "False Dawn" on November 5, and you can catch a few of the tracks right now on Bandcamp. This duo from New York will blow your mind with their unique blend of desert rock and heavy psych. A lot of time and effort went into these songs, and the result is an album full of heavy riffs and mellow melodies. Listen to the pre-release tracks from Spacelord's "False Dawn" on Bandcamp:
False Dawn draws together the band's many influences, from 70s acid rock like Zeppelin and Sabbath to the dark, heavy sound of Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. "Some of the music was written in the days and weeks that followed the death of my brother, while some others were concepts I had wanted to explore for a long while," said guitarist Rich Root. "We're taking the personal impressions of all of our influences and amalgamating them into something that makes us feel like the music we love makes us feel."
We kicked around a bunch of art direction ideas, but we didn't have a clear vision, we were just looking for something that might inspire us. There were several artists we considered working with, and we found some amazing museum photography of ancient artifacts that might have worked. In the meantime, I was messing around with this program called Artbreeder. Artbreeder uses something called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to "learn" what different types of images should look like, and which ones look best. Users then collaborate with the program by setting the parameters or mixing different images or types of images together. It has an album art setting, which is what gave me the idea to go in this direction. There were some promising images from our early experiments (I've attached an example here),
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| Early version of the album cover by Artbreeder |
but the problem is, Artbreeder knows albums have word-like shapes on the covers. But it doesn't know what words actually are, so when it generates album art it creates these weird cryptoglyphs in place of the band name and album title. We'd have to either incorporate them into our concept or just put our text over them. In the end we weren't happy with what we got out of the program. Then I started playing with Artbreeder's landscape setting. By going through several iterations, it started to learn what kind of fantastical, surreal visions I liked best. When we got this one, it was instantly clear we had a winner. So this album cover is actually a crop of a wider landscape. There's also an alternate version of it that could serve as the back cover if we're ever able to do a vinyl run of False Dawn.
TLDR; Hell yea!
"Vs. Gargantuan" by SUPERLORD rips. Simple as that. 4 tracks that spend most of 30 minutes laying down a metal assault that is both super fresh but also reminiscent of the best of 70s and 80s metal.
I would still listen to 80s metal if it all sounded this good. And to be fair (to the band, not to 80s metal), SUPERLORD adds some modern elements from stoner doom like extended riffs and an extra layer of fuzz. And the clean guitar solos (especially in "Desert Ruins") are right out the best of 70s heavy rock. That's not to say any of these riffs are derivative. Not in the least. It's more like, SUPERLORD is inspired a lot of great music, and on "Vs. Gargantuan" they are sharing those inspirations with us.
Fuzzy's Favorite: "Desert Ruins" which is easily one of the best songs from last year that I've heard. But the whole EP is just as solid and just as good, and the extended length of "Alice Olive" definitely gives it some bonus points, while the vocals on the title track are flat-out heroic (musically and lyrically).
SUPERLORD is from England with members:
Check out their shirt with art by Steve Yoyada and follow the band at https://superlordband.bandcamp.com
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| PSYLOW |
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| DESERTS OF MARS new heavy rock EP "Return from the Void" |
Austin, TX based Deserts of Mars was formed in 2006 with a heavy fuzzed out bass sound and the idea that the Riff Rules ALL!!!
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| Bretus "Aion Tetra" Italian doom metal |
Ghenes (High/Low Guitars and Fx),
Zagarus (Vox),
Janos (Bass),
Striges (Drums)
Doom band from Italy founded in 2000.
Their inspirations are: Old horror movies, H.P. Lovecraft, mysticism and 70's music.
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| WEIGHTLESS WATERS from Finland's KING OF NONE |
We're King of None, a 5-piece heavy psychedelic stoner prog rock band from the arctic wastelands of Finland. We released our third EP entitled Weightless Waters in May 2019 and even got a song onto Spotify's editorial playlist "Metal from Finland", which is a huge deal for us with Finland being known for its metal music.
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| Where Light Goes to Die by Hot Ram |
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| Shroud by SpaceMetal |