Seismic
Small Stone CD
Summertime in good old Blighty and on a lucky day you might just see the odd glimpse of the sun. On such days it’s customary to play some sunshiney skittish pop like The Beach Boys or The Association – so it was with with incongruity that I put on the latest album from Canadian super-heavyweights Sons of Otis.
The sky darkened as the first notes of ultra-monolithic psychedelic doom cracked the speakers on my stereo. The touchstone influence here is Electric Wizard; though don’t think for a moment that SoO are some sort of Johnny-come-lately outfit, the band having been active in some form since ’92. The similarities to EW come in the huge crescendo-riffing that still retains a groove, the malignant vocals and the crushing arrangements laced with echo and delay to create a disorientatingly woozy head-bursting metal totem. Some lighter relief is provided by the cover of Mountain’s ‘Never in my Life” though even that track is doused with punishingly psychoactive week-old bongwater.
Towards the end of the record a couple of instrumental tracks, ‘PK’ and ‘Cosmic Jam’, take things one stage further, jetting off from the netherworlds into an equally dark nebula, bringing the full effects overload guitar pulveriser with them. Leaves fall and decay. Fruit withers on the vine. Winter’s coming. Doom up children.
Austin Matthews
No comments:
Post a Comment