Album Review: CLAN - "CARNIVORES"

Clan are a stoner rock band from Norwich, UK that exemplify the sound of the genre as well as any band of this century or the last. The mix of sound and style they are able to seamlessly incorporate into their music makes for something exciting, something quite fresh and new within perfectly executed familiar sounds. The fuzz packed riffs on every song are thickly sweet and mesmerizing. The vocals from front-man and lead guitarist Matt Pearce are singular, powerful, compelling, exotic, and provocative. Yes, they are that good and that unique.

Clan consist of:

Matt Pearce - vocals/guitar
Matt Rabong - bass
Ben Giller - drums

There are 9 songs and an intro on this full length album, so the achievement is commendable in that each track is an intricate, hooky, and memorable display of the band's tapestry of skill and endeavor. The melodies are fun and addictive, whether letting the power of Giller's stickwork course through the inner pathways of your neural system, or allowing the immense horsepower of Rabong's deep bass rhythm overwhelm your sensory presence, or thrilling to the double onslaught of Pearce's vocals and masterful riff-bringer guitar.

Clan bring a lot of old school mentality to their brand of hard rock by focusing first on melody before overlaying their well-crafted ditties with powerful, familiar stoner fuzz, which makes for great excitement on the first spin through the nine tracks, and immense enjoyment on each subsequent spin.

"Carnivore" comes out of the gate with a scorching intensity on the first full song, "Burning Bodies", setting the stage beautifully for what's to follow. The title track is an immense mammoth of sound and splendor as is it's follow on, "Jackal". "Haunt Your Ghost" and "Wolves" pummel through with relentless power and heft. "True Believer" is perhaps the bellwether track, the one that ignites immediate interest and excitement, leaving an indelible bruise of sweet darkness. "Sleep in Salt" showcases the brilliance of the rhythm duo of Rabong and Giller throughout the slightly melancholy and memorable melody. "White Spider" rivals "True Believer" as a signature track, one that radiates with special sweet, ebon melody brimming with dark fire and subterranean power.  "Blood of the Father" closes out this darkly shining gem of an album with the most haunting, slow burn song of the bunch, a viscous and succulent morsel that leaves you yearning for more before you're even done listening.

It's been three years since Clan have released an album, but the wait has been well worth it with this wonderful, witty, and addictive collection of great melodies and powerful stoner metal music.


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New Band To Burn One To: THE BIGGEST THING SINCE POWDERED MILK

Something a bit different today. The 'New Band To Burn One To' feature is meant to showcase bands that haven't gotten much attention and perhaps are just starting out in the underground world of the greatest music ever made. Today's band, The Biggest Thing Since Powdered Milk, doesn't have much of a presence online yet, but they do have the above delectable trio. This little bit, though, will likely make a sizeable impression when you give it a spin. These three island warriors have demonstrated a knack for making big, loud, and fun stoner rock music, combining the mammoth guitar that is the hallmark, of course, of stoner rock with a keen imagination for instant hooks and memorable melodies. They have more songs in the bag and are working their way toward an official album release, so, here is what they have so far, something mighty tasty when enjoyed with a large glass of ice cold powdered milk......or something...., and hopefully piquing your interest enough to keep you on the lookout for that eventual album sure to make a large splash when it arrives.

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DESERT STORM / SUNS OF THUNDER: SPLIT

Coming this week will be an opportunity to pre-order a 7" vinyl split between veteran heavy rock bands Desert Storm and Suns of Thunder.

To warm up for it, here is a gateway to the archives of each band, an excursion well worth a commitment, and never before featured on Heavy Planet.


If you are not yet familiar with either band, you should find that you can enjoy their decibel busting, high wattage music from past releases. Once you've laid your dark, demented minds to waste from the blitzkrieg onslaught of ethereal musical mayhem you might find you are primed for the forthcoming vinyl offering.

DESERT STORM
Desert Storm is a stoner rock, doom rock veteran hailing from the UK. They have an archive of magnificently crafted albums stretching  back to 2008, each chock full of high voltage, low tuned awesomeness. They have been featured quite a number of times at Heavy Planet:

LP Review: Desert Storm - Omniscient
LP Review: Desert Storm - Horizontal Life
New Band to Burn One To - Desert Storm

The gravel voiced frontman Matt Ryan is the epitome of the stoner/doom rock genre, deftly delivering haymaker vocals that match the darkly laden depths of bassman Chris Benoist's thunderous thumping, the supreme riffage and scorching solos of guitarists Chris White and Ryan Cole, as well as the driving dementia of drummer Elliot Cole.

The split features the new song "Signals From Beyond" which is a melodious romp of delightfully amplified distortion, booming and crackling with resonance and grace.

SUNS OF THUNDER
Suns of Thunder are not only prolific, dropping electric energy filled rock and romp dating back to the turn of the century, but are legendary in their home country of Wales. Suns of Thunder were part of a feature on Heavy Planet in which the live event, Swamp Feast, featuring Suns of Thunder, their split partners Desert Storm, as well as The Witches Drum, was caught live by Heavy Planet:

Live Review: Swamp Feast with Honky, Desert Storm, The Witches Drum, and More

High energy, explosive, adroit riffs from dual guitarists Greg Brombroffe and Matt Williams are matched with equal power, intensity, and proficiency by the same pair on their complementary vocals. The rumble and thunder of bassist Chris James propels the music forward with a voracious capacity while the high energy mojo of the music is laid out first and foremost by the virtuoso stickwork of drummer Sam Loring.

The newly crafted song "Earn Your Stripes" delivers another example of the deftly orchestrated melodies of power riffs and raunchy fun to the split with their fellow stoner rock countrymen.

These two massive representatives of rock in the twenty-first century have teamed up to release a high quality contribution of heavy low tuned sublimity this coming April. Pre-sales begin on March 29, in which you can order your vinyl copy here:

http://www.h42records.com/

Desert Storm
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Suns of Thunder
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Sunday Sludge: Haast's Eagled

Though few and far between, I love opportunities (or duties, more appropriately) when I can pull away from a computer for a crisp breath and a skyward glance. My escape from forty weekly hours of glazed repetition is generally reserved for a morning stomp with the next Kylesa or a cleansing of the wicked via DVR catch-up with my wife. Now and then, these Sundays extend a crusty hand that yanks me toward gigantic, primitive buzz. I can't say it puts me in touch with the Earth or throws back my head with an outstretched tongue, but it certainly doesn't feel like these sounds result from digital files, compressed and re-configured through fabricated forums.

Bands bringing the medieval run the risk of tucking cheese into their pockets on their way to summer camp. But straight off the Judas Cradle by way of South Wales comes Haast's Eagled, an experimental, atmospheric sludge-doom act that limits comparisons and expands consciousness. The whole of their four-song self-titled debut EP stones and impales as much as it soothes and swirls. Stoner sensibilities wisp between pummeling sludge pendulums as death's snow taps at fresh graves, with gravity licking the heels of every note.

Setting off Viking is a somber softness, whispering a drone that breaks under electric doom riffs, stretching out to meet a bowel-dug vocal. The break into devastating stoner feedback is countered by classic-rock, Chris Cornell-esque lungs, creating an overall dynamic that's so seldom this successful. The slow stoner groove outlasts all other elements, encompassing listeners through powerful progressions and slow-motion sternum thumps. A trail of gold-flaked licks brightens a sooty sky as this introduction rolls like matted red carpet.

More reflective and somehow more primitive is the cavernous and somber pick of The Eye of God, a a reprieve only lasting until the stoner-doom again emerges and Norse, riff-laden passages unfold to absolutely crush. With a vocal that echoes Ronnie Van Zant on Simple Man, the midpoint is sullen until otherworldly black pit embers set off a slow spiral of flurried madness. So the deep South's influence has made one hell of a trip, seemingly reaching back to a time when only candles broke the darkness.

An intermission by comparison, Tracking the Footsteps of Goliath slowly drones, peeking through shaky samples and ominous cymbals. Oh, but that sludge dominates and smears the landscape, flattening and churning as if to introduce Cruithne Tide, the twelve-minute crusher that closes this all-too-short EP. The track as a whole is cool and melodic, but the loose echoes convey a sad, hollow cave trickle. As fire begins to rain and fiefdom villages collapse, the first track is bookended and the cycle appears complete. Drums join hands with warbled guitar whispers for a cold stroll through the ruins, slowly and deliberately lifting pace without a hint of rattle. Atmospheres, peeling layers, realignment, solos, hesher nods, drone cameos, and sludge cruises... I'd rather this never ended.

So is it lament or nostalgia? I know, it goes much deeper than that. But when I can't pinpoint exactly how I'm being taken to a time and place where I've never been, it's difficult to explain myself. Haast's Eagled weave a tapestry of sound that's as complete and comforting as any I've heard this year. Birth, school, work, death. This release mortars the cracks of life's cruel structure, providing a true sludge-doom escape that lays a breadcrumb trail while you lose yourself. Good thing, too. I'd love to talk about these guys again.

For fans of: Horn of the Rhino, Conan, Earth
Pair with: 8-Bit Pale Ale, Tallgrass Brewing Co.

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Sunday Sludge: Khünnt - "Dead Eyes"

Apparently there's nothing wrong at the neighbor's house. I could've testified to hearing someone being brutalized just across the driveway considering the screams and chaos emerging from an unpinned source. That's the problem with any decent pair of headphones. I find myself ripping out the buds and pausing for fifteen seconds to make sure there isn't some primitive beast darting up my stairs. Even if the old dude next-door enjoys the company, I still feel like a tool for my 1:00am visit to ask if he's been stabbed.

As it turns out, Newcastle's Khünnt were the source of confusion. The off-shot bloody Barbie doll being clawed to shreds was the band's vocals. Two tracks on Dead Eyes chew up thirty-six painfully awesome minutes and, depending on your pain threshold, can prove to be either the best or the worst half-hour of your day. Soiling everything with a medieval meld of sludge, drone, doom, and noise, Khünnt deliver a crushing couplet of dried blood and cracked femurs.

Boiling down to a simple Side A and Side B format, these songs celebrate misery and misanthropy. There's no good son / bad son dynamic to be found; these sordid "experimentations" burn with malice aforethought. Side A, numbing with a long-opening Peterbilt rumble, screech and hum just long enough to nurse hope before an agonizingly slow smoke-soaked descent. Burning fuzz saturates the ice-pick barbs, riffs are too fucking gargantuan to trivialize in a wordy weekly column, and rhythms drop like a slow-motion jump from a jagged cliff. Watch your footing, dipshit. If the fall doesn't kill you, the anaphylactic shock and peeling flesh will. At times we're drowning in drone. At others there's one lost vocal crying out for another, eyeless and stunned stupid. A drumkit is flattened behind an endless reel of mayhem, while listeners are more than a little troubled.

Side B is at once the album's more malevolent and more merciful number. Rusty chains and glowing eyes decorate this hollow corridor, poking and bleeding out a bleak streak promised on Side A. Scorching guitar squeals, frayed strings, and a dance with crashing planes are just a few highlights among the swells of feedback. Call it cockeyed sludge-doom intoxication, buried tempos choke on loosened earth and dive headfirst into an archaic violation of the innocent. Riffs outlast the drone, but that commanding vocal torment again gives pause. The quickest of churns emerges only briefly, giving in and immediately going knees-to-sky for the heavy drone element at track's end. The squelch acts as the final snuff in a series of death-rattle gasps, closing the record and extinguishing the agony.

I'm shaking my head. The sounds merge and split and splinter, leaving listeners with no road map on what to expect. Through and through, Dead Eyes is relentless and crushing, drawing out fears through means of improvisational extraction. Recommended for listeners with a strong stomach, this sludge goes a step or two beyond just being dirty; this is disassociative clamor rupturing your insides with a carving fork. I'm not telling you to ignore your instincts and assume the din is Khünnt's doing, I'm simply saying you may need to leave on your nightlight.

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Sunday Sludge: Opium Lord - "The Calendrical Cycle - Prologue: The Healer"

I didn't feel like getting raped today. I woke up and figured the likelihood of being penetrated was relatively low. I even figured a handful o' pills would be better left alone and maybe I'd try to turn things around for myself. I'll ditch the paranoia, wrap my knees before stumbling to the door, and crack open a warm case o' seldom-seen sunshine. Y'know, just as a step in the right direction. Maybe I should've shown a little backbone and given Birmingham's Opium Lord the slip. But one taste had me hooked.

Today we're enjoying the band's infancy, though you wouldn't know it by listening to their too short, two-track EP The Calendrical Cycle - Prologue: The Healer. Nine-and-a-half ticks hardly seem sufficient in captivating a listener, but there's more brutal disenchantment to behold here than on any 70-minute LP. Being the first in a series of three, Prologue: The Healer hardly leaves anything in the tank. Crushing, ominous, blackened sludge-doom is one way to describe it. Another approach is to gush at what this band is promising: two subsequent slabs of violent chop-and-toss scorn in coming months. But let's remain focused on what's in front of us.

With the name Opium Lord and track titles Heroin Swirls and Street Labs, one can wonder if the band is taking aim at junkies and their desperate, pathetic crawls or if they're... um... taking drugs themselves. As loose and erratic as these tracks can grow, there's an undeterred tightness that reappears just before the wheels come off. All at once jarring and incredibly sobering, Prologue: The Healer is gonna require Penicillin and a tub of Vitamin E.

Oh, those Heroin Swirls... gritty with fuzz and hollowed-out with a barrage of tin drums, this behemoth leaves a metallic aftertaste without the benefit of a chaser. The doomy sludge effectively pauses for old-school film reel clicks, grainy and quite somber. That middle passage is reserved for collecting pools of blood as you stand still, but screeches and spirals are bound to rip at your insides and leave your fingernails gnarled. But hey, now your skittish tics and leers have found their logical scapegoat. The choking vocal plays both victim and offender, but the scrape for understanding seems universal. The track's final minute is impudent punishment; a series of sustained brushes with concrete walls offering less give than Satan himself. I hope your mom packed your helmet.

Faster than its predecessor, Street Labs is a screeching stampede of varying speeds from every angle. Guitars string themselves from rafters as vocals bite the curb and try to stay breathing. Licks are buzzsaws here, spraying rooster tails of filth and dust. The tinny-pluck distance accompanying the crunchy chops is spooky, but you're too drained to do anything other than wave it closer. There's more sludge here than on Heroin Swirls, and the band's incessant buzz leaves your head numb and your tongue bleeding. And when it's all over, there's no track 3. You'll hit repeat and discover more questions than answers.

Put down the spoon and loosen your tourniquet. This EP is today's fix. At the very least, plug in your headphones and doom out as you wait in line for your methadone. These two sludgy bricks are gonna resonate for months, the perfect 12-step soundtrack! Y'know what? Your sponsor can get fucked; Opium Lord deliver the drift and won't turn up in a drug screen. The violent black pit you've entered is likely the best heaviness you'll hear for some time. Embrace it, turn it up, and try to avoid stealing your mom's car again. Just get through today, because chapter 2 is on the way. Good God, this is good shit.

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Sunday Sludge: Spider Kitten - "Cougar Club"

Here again, I'm left with my jaw open and my dick in my hand. As the year winds down, we tend to pack and seal our definitive declarations a little too early, eager to tuck in every corner and finally call a spade a spade. What's good is good, what's not is forgotten, and what's ahead is given the nod over what's happening right in front of us. So when I've gotta slam the brakes and question why greatness went unnoticed, it throws everything else into question along with it.

Let's be fair; Spider Kitten's Cougar Club isn't being officially released until January, so I'm not talking about missing this album. Nuclear Dog got to me in time, smacking my face with a cold hand and doing little more than tucking the tape into my denim jacket. But take a look back at Spider Kitten's prolific, tireless catalog and you'll see what I'm getting at. These burners have spun, by my count, more than twenty releases over the course of the last decade. WHAT?! So I'll backtrack a tad, but this current release is gonna be hard to turn off.

The hot, eerie corridor-drone that opens Twin Obscenities hardly spoils what lays ahead on Cougar Club. Between the buzzes and crushes, the ridiculously heavy drops lumber and stagger alongside an unparalleled two-ply vocal haunt. Slow, thick, and surprisingly melodic, the dark doom crust begins to set and the balance of trudge and cool-panned guitar snags your ponytail and never loosens the grip on your senses. Atmospheres aren't firmly cemented, though. These guys have more than a few arrows in their quiver. 

Sci-Fi guitar repetitions summon 2001: A Space Odyssey's Hal on Burdened, later utilizing a stoner-sludge buzz to lull and coax us. Remaining fuzzier than your mom's top lip, this cruiser shifts moods and enters a spacey jam. Guitar shavings splinter, Chris weaves a web of beats, and we're privy to a smoke-soaked extended lunch in a high school parking lot. What follows is a slow unroll of the doom carpet on a cover of Dark World by Saint Vitus. Sludge plods and pauses, vocals echo, and guitar honors with sacrilege in a burned night sky. Throwback, vintage, whatever. It's also well-realized and stamped with Spider Kitten's brand (and likely Wino's seal of approval).

Well, we find reprieve on Time Takes Its Toll, less an intermission and more a breath of clean, countryside air. Where the bulk of Cougar Club teems and sticks, this acoustic strum is stripped down and cheekily hopeful. I couldn't help but adopt an Orange Goblin-hires-Thom Yorke perspective; no pretense, increasingly unsettling with subsequent listens, and undeniably relaxing. If Chi's sitting under a tree and strumming a cracked wooden box called a guitar, I doubt he hasn't noticed the hillside peppered with rattles and cackles. I said "Goddamn!"

If you're still standing, Cougar Club's title-track closer is packed with head-nodding fuzz, picking up progressive steam with buoyance and catharsis. The vocals here are less presented and more extracted, an almost mid-life Isis (oh, you like that?) in a hazy, uncertain drift. Licks turn skyward, drums fall in line, but Al's bass remains dangerously low. A synth organ suspension screams Pink Floyd's Welcome to The Machine, fronting a hovering tapestry of sonic progressions. Crushing and crunching toward disc's end, the funeral sludge/doom underlayment blankets a chaotic cougar hunt. And the album's final moment is an exercise of staggering sustain.

I know there's another month to go before we close the books on 2012. Oh, and that Mayan calendar bullshit is right around the corner, so maybe we won't even get to usher in a sea of doomed resolutions. But after eleven months of sifting through some pretty incredible offerings from some pretty accomplished acts, it's difficult to find many that are this complete and this proficient. Cougar Club is thick with mood, heavy on variation, and thoroughly stung with riffs and rhythms that'll knock you flat. Moving forward, waving back, and setting the knob to "simmer" is just the beginning for Spider Kitten. And it's embarrassing to admit I'm starting at the end.

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Album Review: Mother Corona - "Out of the Dust"

Early rock and roll of Fifties America influenced the youth of Britain who eventually overwhelmed the music world themselves with the British Invasion of the sixties, inundating radio waves and album sales with new, fresh, exciting music that was a forerunner of massive change in the worldwide culture of man. The British Invasion’s music legacy still rings loud and clear today as music from the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, and so many others can still be enjoyed as everlasting masterpieces. But the seeds were sewn with the tremendous music of 50s America, music that begat change, inspired a generation, and lit the ignition to a musical explosion of incalculable proportions spanning continents and generations.

There are plenty of indications, most notably in the number of bands now in the UK playing variations of stoner, doom, and psychedelia, that select American rock music from the 70s and the 90s has sewn its own seeds, adding to a groundswell across the pond that is just now beginning to burgeon into something significant, something hopefully steadfast and powerful, something that can add to a worldwide development of the ‘good stuff’, music that is real, enjoyable, massive, that has taken the essence of those two rock eras and suffused it with newness, creativity, and sheer volume of both decibels and choice selection. No place represents that uprising better than the warrior islands of the UK where a large number of bands are creating, playing, and producing music that is the sole reason rock n’ roll has not yet died a death of ennui brought about by the decadence of a single controlling voice for what gets played to the masses.

Today’s spotlight falls on one of the highlights of the stoner/psychedlic groundswell with the superb band Mother Corona, who this past April released their first full length LP, “Out of the Dust”. The band consists of Lee Cressey on guitar, Rob Glen on bass, and Dave Oglesby on drums and vocals, a three piece band that creates a whole lot of magic without a whole lot of help. I suspect one of the keys to their beautiful renditions is the simplification in instrumentation, a formula most bands follow whose music makes its way to our site, keeping the music simple, clean, and raw, where distortion is in the amplification of one guitar, where the frequencies aren’t over-mixed to confusion, and nothing gets drowned out by over-instrumentation.

Mother Corona plays stoner music to the maximum, incorporating the very best of the low frequency, fuzzy distortion that is the hallmark of the genre. They incorporate quite a bit of Dozer in the way they structure their music, the best Dozer stuff, the “Coming Down the Mountain” Dozer. The “Trail of a Comet” and “Madre de Dios” Dozer. There’s quite a bit of Firestone, Truckfighters, and early Freedom Hawk in there as well, not to mention some Astroqueen. What they really sound similar to, which is a great thing, are their fellow UK upstarts Steak, Enos, and Trippy Wicked & the Cosmic Children of the Knight. Make no mistake, though, these guys carve out their own superb, face stomping, diesel fuel burning inter-continental ballistic mayhem filled with huge, powerful, balls to the wall sound that drives hard and deep without relent.

These guys have been kicking it around since 2006, trouping down the same roads as their warrior isle compatriots, building up a grassroots following by playing in bars and taverns with the occasional gig opening for better known acts that weren’t better acts. This is the typical story. What’s not typical is their music. While it is derivative, it is also unique, a result hard to engineer to say the least. Their music sounds like what you love while not being a copy of anything else you’ve ever heard. Oglesby’s vocals are reminiscent mostly of Alice in Chain’s Layne Staley, but are uniquely suited to Mother Corona’s loud and abusive music, setting the tone perfectly on each song and carrying its weight in instrumentation throughout. At the same time for Mr. Oglesby the drumwork is mighty and fierce, doing more than the typical requirement of keeping the time by relentlessly driving the music forward with panache and heart. Rob Glen’s bass adds a stout component to the melodies and pace of the music with a thunderous, raucous, and raunchy delivery filled with passion and skill. The guitar of Lee Cressey is adept, masterful, wonderful, and wild. He takes it places that induce wonderment and deep satisfaction, plunging into the darkest depths of distortion and soaring to the heights of psychedelic stratospheres. Blended together these 4 instruments deftly and expertly rendered by the 3 musicians of Mother Corona combine to form some of the finest stoner/psych music of a generation.

The six minute track “Hedonist King” starts off the album and immediately sets the tone with some trippy guitar to go along with the energetic drums of the opening seconds. Vocals become a focal point quickly into this funky, fun tune where “ . . . dancing in the rain, drinking in the sun . . . “ sets the tone for a hedonistic trip replete with groovy riffs, head swinging bass, and chunky, heart pounding drums, overlaid with sing along vocal decadence.

“Sunscope” brings the fuzz, hot and heavy, relentlessly rendered by both guitars in a display of power, with primeval solos delivering long, satisfying salvos of chest thumping dynamism in over five minutes of a superb specimen of stoner rock music.

The third track gets to showcase an opening with strictly bass and light, acid induced guitar work dancing above, along with a bit of cymbal spangle to accentuate the deep distortion that is strictly a setup for the booster engine explosion that becomes “Sonic Tomb”. The pace is fast, the effort is maximal, and the sound is deep and brutal.The listener becomes the poor ringer slated to fight the champ and gets round after round of constant jabs and right hooks, each heavier and more fierce than the last, relentless in delivery, and somehow beautiful in ferocity.

“Cosmic Collisions” at number four comes in at seven and a half minutes of deep, dark, distortion, low, slow, heaviness pouring through every crack and crevice until you are filled to the brim with big chunks of fuzz. Steady all the way through but overlaid with cloudy riffs and foghorn guitar solos, this song is the megaton meteorite from space that has punched a hole in the atmosphere before cratering the landscape with its sonic boom of distortion.

Track 5, “Qualuude 74’ “ is another low, slow fuzzbomb with a beautiful tempo within each stanza that leads into chainsaw choruses before giving way to a series of skillfully rendered solos, along with athletic and powerful bass riffs, and finally leading into a final but urgent stanza and chorus set. The lyrics are a longing for an old favorite in recreational mind and mood alteration, qualuudes, a prescription medication no longer available but fondly remembered for its effects.

“V.A.G.” gets my vote for favorite song. Not necessarily best, because they are all superb, buy my favorite nonetheless. It has a classic tempo, upbeat and pure enjoyment, striking that primal, tribal chord that triggers movement from deep down, exploding outward in a shiver of sparks and energy. It is a short treatment but packs a mighty wallop of fuzz and fun. It is primarily an instrumental with a short vocal set brimming with intense delivery. Riffs and solos abound, drums are intense and insistent, the bass as primal as the rhythm.

Number 7, “Nuclear Winter”, is an eight minute treasure that strikes a chord somewhere between nostalgia and yearning, conjuring all the best music of eras gone by while promising the best of what’s to come. This song leans toward the psychedelic with a trippy trek that meanders through the minstrel waters of early seventies Steppenwolf while towing high tech equipment utilized to the max by the guitar solos of Lee Cressey, rhythmically driven forward by the scull-like strokes of Oglesby’s sticks as he croons beautifully that it’s “ . . . oh so cold . . . “ Perhaps this is the best song on the album, no one would argue the point I’m sure.

The title track is number 8, an up tempo fuzz bomb that sets a livlier tone than the majority of the songs on the album while still unleashing furious and heavy nap and pile gutiar work. The song ends at about the 4 minute mark, but leads into a hidden jewel after 2 minutes of silence. After the 6 minute mark Mother Corona lay down a beautifully rendered ode to the fathers of stoner metal and fuzz rock music, Black Sabbath, by playing “Into the Void”. It’s not Ozzy and Tommy, but Dave, Lee, and Rob do a superb job of covering the song, putting as much into it as they do their own stuff, which is a considerable tribute from a trio of musicians that play music at its best to one of rock’s biggest legends who can certainly be considered as one of the all time best.

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