Song of the Day-Golden Void-"Burbank's Dream"

"Burbank's Dream" is taken off of the new release "Berkana" out now on Thrill Jockey Records. This song encompasses everything so great about this band. A killer riff, a great hook, an amazing vocal and an out of this world soaring guitar solo. This band is the reigning champs of the stoner/psych scene right now. If you haven't done so, do yourself a solid and check these guys out. The video for "Burbank's Dream" premiered on Decibel Magazine the other day. View it here. For more information, please check out the following links: Facebook | Bandcamp

Quick Hit: SKUNK

Heavy Rock From Elder Times-Skunk

As soon as the vocals entered on opening track "Forest Nymph" I knew I was hooked. Soaked in the classic seventies rock sound, this Hard/Heavy Rock band from Oakland, CA delivers the goods. With a vocal shrill reminiscent of the late Bon Scott, the band rolls through six weed-induced riff-filled nuggets on their new demo (yep, I said demo). 

 I mean seriously, how can you go wrong with tracks like "Devil Weed and "Wizard Bong". Give these guys a listen, you'll dig it!

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New Band To Burn One To: Blackwülf

Heavy Planet presents...Blackwülf

Heavy on the heavy, doomy on the riffing, this vintage metal band from Oakland, CA has hit the nail on the proverbial head. Blackwülf  is comprised of Alex Cunningham (Vocals), Pete Holmes (Guitar), Dave Pankenier (Drums), and Scott Peterson (Bass). As I placed this red vinyl beauty onto my turntable. I gleamed with enthusiasm. The band's debut release "Mind Traveler" was all that I had hoped for. The record is filled to the brim with fist pumping metal anthems, head-banging rhythms and a clean impassioned vocal. A hint at late-eighties to early nineties doom can be heard throughout. Permeating into the doominess is a keen sense of melody that is interspersed with the album's hint at psychedelia.
This is meat and potatoes metal people. Dig in!



Favorite tracks: Royal Pine, Thunderwitch

Beer Pairing: Magic Hat Howl

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Sunday Sludge: Lycus - "Tempest"

Depending on a multitude of circumstances, funerals can unfold any number of ways. If the dead has fulfilled his tenure and died peacefully in his sleep, services can operate more as a celebration of life. On the other hand, an untimely passing or long bout with illness can make for some dark reflections. Your mother is draped in head-to-toe black, your father is staring at his hands trying not to wince, and somewhere in the back is brewing a drunken diatribe from your aunt blaming everyone but herself.

What's the weather like in Oakland? Given the three haunting, mournful passages on the debut full-length from Lycus, you'd doubt they came from anywhere that ever sees the sun. Formed in 2008, the band has endured lineup changes, a full break-up, and a relocation to bring us current with the July 9th release of Tempest. How's your summer? Well, it's about to get pretty bleak. Melding a barrel of dirge with buckets of tears, Tempest is arriving just in time to keep you from taking anything for granted.

From the album's onset, the hollow thumps of Coma Burn predict no break in the procession. With drone riffs and doom pacing, there's no pretense and no deception. This is somber and pensive. The chants and growls are equally pained, more rueful than aggressive. Downward riff-mangles are split by eerie echoes, but we can only watch and wait as the gurgle meets the mire. Tin-drum space guitars wrap screeches in a sullen, smoky whisper that's slow and reflectively sad. Winds entwine the track's canopy, channeling what no longer walks. Hell... channeling what no longer breathes.

Engravings is an exercise in slow sonic extraction. The track is melodic and fluid, even when the drums spit and spurt against guitar-drawn mists. Via the hollow bounce of combating elements, the disc's theme is by now cemented in the dirty, frozen memory that's gonna ache like hell. The doom riffs here are massive, but there's an evolving, carnivorous filth that's drug out. Lycus may as well be smoking the bones of the long dead, shaking by a funeral pyre just trying to warm themselves.

The disc's title track is a twenty-minute crusher, but the clean mist of morning is an expansive introduction. Growing into a skittish, paranoid trek down a splintered-wood trail, Tempest is hooded and commanding. The strings begin to steal the show, but what's surprising is that they're neither distractive or extraneous. The elemental swirl progressively breathes and builds on a veil of choppy doom. There's even an odd thrash break, but the sway returns as guitar licks provide an awesome ambiguity. The thick contemplations realize a heady potential at the track's agonizing close. The buzzing transition from this world to the next pares down to little more than a lonely, icy stumble strewn with cobwebs. Don't bother looking back.

Lycus find their corner with an unsettling breed of dread that doesn't rely on explicit fear. What was feared already arrived and stole what was sacred. Heaviness comes in many forms, but a heart swollen and crushed may take the greatest toll. The passages are long and filled with questions, while the sporadic outbursts are natural and easy to forgive. This is one awfully, beautifully dark record. Wholly and unrelentingly painful, Lycus walk into grief with thick skin and mud-caked fists. Sit with the feeling, they'll tell you. It's the only way out.

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Zac's "Double Dose": Abstracter / Madre De Dios

Abstracter: Tomb of Feathers 

Abstract. Ethereal. Fathomless. Just some words that come to mind while experiencing Abstracter's summer 2012 release Tomb of Feathers. The album packs a monstrous forty minutes into three tracks. Each tracks shows a grand depth in atmosphere similar to post-metal geniuses Isis. Listeners can find the bass tuned to 'earth-shatter' mode and the vocals scorch from blackened screams and growls to melancholy cleans. Truly another step into, if I may borrow a phrase from Mr. Aaron Tuner's book, 'thinking man's metal'. Check out distorted nightmare that is To Vomit Crows below and stream the rest of this behemoth at bandcamp.

 

Members: 

Ben - Drums 

Jose - Bass
Mattia - Vocals 

Robin - Guitar

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Madre De Dios: Sin Rabia Al Nacer 

Unfortunately, I cannot speak Spanish. Although, lucky enough for my Spanish speaking friends Madre De Dios and all the readers here at Heavy Planet, I fluently comprehend what their saying through their gritty mixture of stoner grooves and punk intensity. The release has a fine ebb and flow from bass laden fuzz, guaranteed to have your head buzzin', to straight up punk noise and anxiety. Check out my favorite tune Sanatorio and listen for that extra fuzzy bass! The entire album can be heard streaming at soundcloud.

 

Members: 

Jonas - Guitar // Vocals 

Milo - Drums // Back-up Vocals 

Rodrigo - Bass // Back-up Vocals

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Nuclear Dog's Atomic Split: Stallone - "American Baby" / Lecherous Gaze - "On the Skids"

The name of the game today, followers of the doom, is pure, sweet rock. Nothing fancy, nothing way off center, no adjustments needed because you have prepared your whole life for listening to this type of music, where the guitar is king, the drums are worthy, and the bass is the badass enforcer of sonic onslaught. Just be sure to limber up those cervical muscles in preparation for swinging that head, something that always comes when the rawk is being righteously rolled and the rawk is pure rock, and is something beyond excellent, beyond great, something that is simply goooooood goddamned rock.

STALLONE - "American Baby"

When the lead guitarist for the awesome groups MonstrO and Torche, Juan Montoya, began playing for fun with work friend and gifted drummer Evan Diprima at a friend's house in 2009 an instant vortex of creativity and energy was unleashed onto the rock world. After recording a few songs together they realized the music was something worthwhile and needed to take that next step toward putting it all out there for the world. Montoya recruited Thomas Gonzalez on second guitar and C.J. Ridings on bass and before too long they were Stallone and had recorded "American Baby", a six song compilation of pure, unadulterated, unfiltered, and riff laden rock and roll.

What is extremely cool about Stallone and "American Baby" is the lack of vocals as a fifth instrument, placing the music out there front and center and inviting the listener to climb aboard without benefit of vocalization. Songs like that have to have the energy and substance to sate the musical cravings of the listener on each iteration without presenting any gaping holes over which to glide. There can't be the repetitive sameness that would quickly breed disinterest without the masking vocalizations of a lyrical entity. Montoya and company pull that feat off with vigor, skill, and aplomb.

The guitars are thick and fuzzy, down tuned just enough to be lush and toothsome while the rhythm section displays a potent attack of bass and drums. All six songs bring pure rock pleasure in their nimble yet simple affectations. From the opening tune, "And Begin", where down tuned stoner guitars are demonstrated during the songs's introduction and blaze a distorted trail throughout, to the funky, stylish, yet fuzzy "Beyond" where the solos sear a hole into one aural canal and out the other, and finishing up with "Ancient Infant" an apt epithet for a song fresh and full of both inventiveness and old school guitar riffage that scorches and burns like old school rock, like it was meant to be played, like you want to hear it every time you get the chance to listen.





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LECHEROUS GAZE - "On the Skids"

Out of Oakland, California come a band, Lecherous Gaze, that has many intriguing and compelling aspects, not the least of which is their ability to flat out unleash the rock. Borrowing from the bio on last.fm : 

"Annihilation Time had a heart attack. We gave it a baboon heart. It became Lecherous Gaze. Asshole Rock. Come Hungry."

Those few sentences give incredible insight into this foursome of friends that were born to play hard, heavy, old school rock and roll, born to be in a rock band that conforms to nothing at all other than what they define as great rock and what sounds to them like great music. You just gotta love it.

Band members are Noel Sullivan, Chris Grande, Zarian Zaidi, and Graham Clise.

"Into the Skids" isn't due out until early October, but below are some links that will let you know just exactly how incredible this foursome lay down the licks. Their music is old school, new school, future school, only school, combining intelligent melodies, let-loose execution, once-in-a-generation guitar work that will assault you at the same time it cajoles you to delve deeper to discover hidden riff treasures so precious they could devalue the gold and platinum standards by the time you finish playing all eleven tracks on this album.

Each song on the album is pure pleasure, providing a significant collection of rock tunes flush with fever that'll boil you senseless as it fries your brain to a crisp. "Frustrated" is big and voluminous in sound, with a beautiful tempo that strikes directly to your primal core before surrendering to a white hot solo radiating with brilliance. "War Woman" is a supernova riff engine that delivers pure enjoyment with its plasma beam solos that rip you a new one while leaving the edges cauterized and clean of unnecessary clotting and seepage. "The Grasp" displays the same tremendous dexterity and pureness of sound as its brethren while offering a slight variation on the melodic song structure that has been to this point the central theme throughout the myriad hard and heavy offerings, this time providing a slight change that simply adds to the majesty of the collection. Perhaps the ass kickingest song on the album is "Bagagozo", which is a ripsaw blade glowing blood red as it slices its way through a thick, meaty, fuzzy melody overlaid with searing, scorching solos of magnificent delivery.

This foursome have fun with their music, and relish in their ability to deliver rock that is fine and pure, comparable to any of the best ever made in any era and in any place.

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