A Heavy Psychedelic Afrobeat-Metal Suite From Here Lies Man

Here Lies Man are a spinoff of legendary second-wave Afrobeat band Antibalas. Their first couple of records basically metalized that Fela-inspired sound, with mixed results. Their new album Ritual Divination – streaming at Bandcamp – is where the rubber really hits the road.

They’re found themselves here: if you have to hang a name on what they’re doing, you could call it heavy psychedelia. Rhythms shift suddenly, dubwise touches filter through the mix occasionally, guitars roar and stab. Because much of this album is basically a suite – or a Fela-style sidelong jam separated into shorter tracks – it’s best enjoyed as a whole. And it’s a long album, sixteen songs, mostly instrumental: you could say that after awhile it all sounds like one long song, but it’s a good one.

They open the album with In These Dreams, a loping minor-key groove with gusts from Marcos Garcia’s distorted guitar and organ from Doug Organ (that’s the dude’s name) over a beat that’s practically reggae until the chorus kicks in. I Told You (You Shall Die), the second track, is a killer minor-key number that could be a heavier Budos Band with a mellotron.

They run the big, brisk riff from Underland over and over, then with What You See they shift up the tempos with it. Can’t Kill It has a circling stoner blues riff, a tricky rhythmic interlude from bassist JP Maramba and drummer Geoff Mann and a big, swirly stampede. Things get swirlier, then more suspensefully gritty in Run Away Children

If Sabbath had played Afrobeat – or if Fela had been a metalhead – you’d have I Wander. There’s a little stoner boogie in Night Comes, and postpunk stomp in Come Inside.

Collector of Vanities has the whole picture: funereal organ, punchy chords, allusive chromatics. Disappointed will not disappoint you with its weird mashup of garage rock, dark dub and a goofy Sabbath reference. Then the band shift between leaden riffage and fleet-footed, organ-spiced Afrobeat in You Would Not See From Heaven.

Strangely, The Fates Have Won is one of the album’s catchiest yet most hypnotic tracks. Out Goes the Night has weirdly undulating rhythms and the trippiest organ parts here. The group finally wind everything up with Cutting Through the Tether, another organ-infused tune and the most trance-inducing one on the album.

Tantalizingly Heavy Freebies from Riding Easy Records

In 2021, record labels are like video stores were twenty years ago. Riding Easy Records are the rare label who have managed to carve out a successful niche – in all things heavy. Stoner boogie, doom metal, psychedelia, biker rock, they’ve got you covered. Their Xmas 2020 mixtape – a free download at Bandcamp – is an obvious ploy to get you to stock up on their vinyl. And practically everything they put out is worth owning on vinyl, as this playlist confirms.

There’s an insane amount of music here, seventeen tracks. Some of these acts are well known, others less so, and many have received coverage here. Take the Goners, who mash up psychedelic garage rock with metal riffs and whose album Good Mourning recently got the thumbs-up. They’re represented by the album’s most bizarre track, Down and Out, a blend of Ventures and early Iron Maiden with a spacy interlude for horns. Go figure.

Here Lies Man, an Antibalas spinoff who metalize Afrobeat, open the mix with I Told You (You Shall Die), a killer minor-key number that could be a heavier Budos Band with a mellotron. Lake, by Spelljammer, has brisk fuzz-and-wah bookending the surprisingly slinky sludge in between. Warish‘s hammering Say to Please looks back to Queens of the Stone Age, while Deathchant‘s Holy Roller is a surreal mashup of heavy 70s boogie, screamo and hip-hop.

Alator’s Lost and Never Found has vintage Sabbath gloom and catchiness, plus a cool funeral organ solo. Biker rock band the Death Wheelers earned a good Halloween month review with their latest album, whose title track is the chugging faux-bikesploitation theme Divine Filth. Death Is Coming, by R.I.P., is a more 70s-oriented throwback to Bon Scott-era AC/DC and Judas Priest.

Hellfire‘s Victims moves forward in time about seven or eight years to the new wave of British heavy metal and Iron Maiden, whose catchiest, poppiest side they emulate. Headbang, by Rapid Tears, and the Mopptops’ Our Lives are pretty standard-issue Nuggets garage nostalgia at slightly higher volume

The ersatz Hendrix of Randy Holden’s Blue My Mind appears on the reissue of the former Blue Cheer guitarist’s extremely rare 1970 vinyl debut, Population II. First State Bank’s lysergically multitracked Mr. Sun and Debb Johnson’s politically volatile heavy soul single Dancing in the Ruin are also 70s rarities digitized and resurrected on the latest volume in the popular Brown Acid compilation series – they’re up to eleven now, just like Spinal Tap. And Gypsy, by Indianapolis psychedelic band Ice, is the strangest rediscovery here, a bizarre riff-rock tune with hints of the Moody Blues and the Move. Riding Easy Records reissued their lone, similarly surreal 1970 album, The Ice Age, last June.

Thomas V. Jager, frontman of Monolord, contributes The Bitter End, a lo-fi gothic ballad evoking a well-known Animals hit. The album’s final cut seems to be a stoner joke: no spoilers. Download and enjoy.

Blue Oyster Cult on the Highway Out of Hell

The Man and the Boy pushed the shopping cart slowly down the empty Road. Inside, under the two solar panels the Man had found at an abandoned lumber yard, were their clothes and a bunch of canned goods. It was all they had room for. He’d hooked up the panels to his phone, not because there was any phone service anymore, or anyone he knew to call if he could, but for the music on it. He’d found a cable splitter in the burnt-out rubble of a phone store so that each could listen with both ears. The Man didn’t often do that: he had to listen for other people, to be ready on a second’s notice to get off the Road and cover up.

“What does this remind you of?” the Man asked the Boy, hopefully. The song that was playing was This Ain’t the Summer of Love, from the album Blue Oyster Cult Live at Rock of Ages Festival, July 30th 2016. You could stream it at Spotify before the lockdowners had shut that service down. And then the whole web went down. And then most of the world. The Man and the Boy hadn’t seen people in a month.

“The verse sounds like Steve Wynn. The chorus sounds like the Stones,” the Boy replied.

He’d learned well!

The Man cursed himself for not loading more old favorites onto the phone: almost everything was new, or relatively new, from since the time he’d bought it. All the same, he’d tried to construct a history of music from the albums and tracks he had. When the two first hit the Road, he’d made sure to give the Boy a lesson every day. Too bad there wasn’t any Bach organ music. The Boy had suffered in silence through the St. Matthew Passion and the Klavierubung on piano. But he seemed to dig Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich, especially the String Quartet No. 8 which the Man had forgotten was on the phone. Played by an obscure quartet, but still plenty chilling.

Trouble was, there was hardly any hip-hop, no country, not much blues, and trying to interest the Boy in jazz turned out to be a lost cause.

The Boy liked metal.

Good thing there was plenty of that, starting with a weird bunch of bands playing Sabbath covers and a solid Metallica mix. So far they’d burned through Q5, Black Swan, Wovenhand, Heavy Temple, Solace and Firebreather, and they were on BOC now.

The Man had left all his records, including the first ten BOC albums, behind at the house, and he resolved to fix that after they got off the Road, further south where it was warmer. He’d find another house, hopefully with no decaying corpses in it, another abandoned Home Depot, get some more panels, and rig up a real stereo. And build a still, and find a truck with a stick shift that would start if you pushed it fast enough. And maybe someday they’d go back to the old house, running on alcohol since all of the gas stations were empty now, and collect all the vinyl.

That was down the Road, though. Right now they had to get south enough to where they wouldn’t freeze to death if it snowed. That would take a couple of months, and it was already September.

“What’s up with the can of beer?” the Boy wanted to know. The song was The Golden Age of Leather.

“That’s a toast. And something for the band to engage the crowd with. You remember when we went to see Metallica, how people would raise their lighters? Same deal but with beer.”

“I don’t like this,” the Boy told the Man. “They play the same thing over and over again.”

The Man didn’t tell the Boy how people who were high when they heard this liked it that way. “Wait til you hear the original version, when we get situated and get all my vinyl down with us.”

“What song does this sound like?” the Boy wanted to know. In an off-key falsetto, he sang a famous 60s pop riff: “I love the ‘something, something’ she wears.”

“That’s the Beach Boys,” the Man replied. “You like the Beach Boys?” he asked, quizzically.

“I hate the Beach Boys. The Beach Girls,” the Boy sneered.

The Man was hopeful. The Boy rarely spoke anymore. Any sign of engagement with the world was a good thing. Everything had been looking up until his mother had taken the vaccine, and six months later, the immune deficiency had reared its ugly, inevitable head, and then she was dead.

As the Man and the Boy reached a hill, the blackened shell of a hospital stood stark against the sky, over the trees. First the lockdowners had vaccinated the doctors and the nurses to kill them off so they could use the hospitals as death camps. Because the National Guard had rebelled and refused to vaccinate people, the Australians had been called in. The lockdowners had shut down the food industry there, so the only way an Australian could eat was to join Trace and Track, or the vaccine army and go to the UK or the US. That’s when the Resistance started burning hospitals and liberating everyone who’d been locked up there, accused of carrying the virus. But it was too late. They’d all been vaccinated, at gunpoint, and they died off fast.

Apppropriately enough, the song that was playing was Burning For You. “You like this one?” the Man asked the Boy.

“It’s ok. What’s a b-side?”

“It’s the flip side of a single. You remember those 45 records your mom had? You know, the ones with the big hole in the middle? Those are singles. The b-side is the song on the other side. It’s not usually as good as the one on the a-side.” The Man kicked himself. Talking about his dead wife was something they’d come to avoid. He hoped the Boy wouldn’t go back into his shell.

“You wait til you hear the album version. Killer guitar solo. That’s Buck Dharma. The rest of the band here is mostly a bunch of replacements, but he’s one of the original guys. Him and the singer. Eric Bloom,” he explained.

And silently resolved to turn the Boy on to the album version of OD’d on Life Itself, too. That was the next song. This version didn’t have that insane peak, where the lead guitar comes spiraling out of the bridge. Here it was haphazard, jagged, not bad, but not something that would rip your face off the first time you heard it.

The Road
Oh, the unwindingness of it all
As if from Barraclough to the pubs of Ulster
A metaphor, yea
A simile
A conundrum

Whoah, stop right there.

Where did that awful Irish poetry come from? Nix that.

Now where were we?

The band were five tracks into their set by now and the song was a relatively new one, Harvest Moon. A backbeat tune. The Boy hummed along with the riff to All Along the Watchtower, then played air guitar when the twin solo kicked in. This kid had good ears, the Man reminded himself.

ME262 was the next song. The Man didn’t say anything about how it was on the slow side, or how the cynicism had been reduced to phony barrelhouse piano and doot-doot backing vocals. Just wait til you hear the original, he promised the Boy, silently.

The Boy did air guitar again for Buck’s Boogie. “It’s kind of like ZZ Top, huh?” he asked.

“Blue Oyster Cult blows away anything ZZ Top ever did,” the Man snorted. Still, this had gotten the kid’s attention. Good thing there was a bunch of BOC on the phone.

The Boy scrunched up his face and bobbed his head for Lips in the Hills. A deep cut with the creepy feel of the band’s classic 70s era, the Man thought. Forty-five years after they started, still going strong. If only I last that long.

Then Came the Last Days of May was next. About halfway through the first verse, a phone rang. The man whipped off his headphones. “Did you hear that? he asked the Boy.

“Yeah,” the Boy said, suddenly energized. “I didn’t think there was phone service anymore.”

The Man picked up the line. No signal. He restarted the song, and sure enough, there was a ringtone on it. Somebody in the band had forgotten to turn his phone off before he went onstage.

The two fell silent, through a weird, spacy Richie Castellano synth solo and the point where drummer Jules Radino and bassist Danny Miranda took the song doublespeed as they always did. The end of the guitar solo, the band really cooking by now, jarred the two road warriors out of their funk.

“Cool solo,” the Boy remarked. “Is this an old song?”

“Really old,” the Man replied. “First album. They always played it this way, real fast, when I used to go see them.”

“Do you think there will ever be concerts again?” the Boy asked.

“Oh yeah,” the Man responded, projecting as much casual confidence as he could. “As soon as we meet other people…”

“…Who aren’t cannibals,” the Boy interrupted.

“Yeah, who aren’t cannibals,” the Man concurred, picturing the headless infant cooked over a spit that they’d stumbled over a couple of weeks before. That was why they had to be careful, to keep one ear on the music and the other on the Road.

On their earbuds, the band had launched into Godzilla. It wasn’t that heavy, the Man told himself; the Boy picked up on the Led Zep quote. The apple obviously hadn’t fallen very far.

Don’t Fear the Reaper was the last song, a long, surprisingly fresh version. “Are you afraid of dying?” the Boy asked the Man.

“Nah,” the Man replied, hoping the blitheless in his voice would rub off. “But we aren’t going to die. We’re going to get off this Road and pick up where we left off. The old normal. No New Abnormal, right?”

“No New Abnormal, yeah,” the Boy replied. On the Boy’s lips, the Man glimpsed a flicker of a smile.

[Apologies to Cormac McCarthy, whose book would have been a lot better without all the extraneous attempts at poetry.]

Elephant Tree’s Stygian, Smoldering Set in Brooklyn Last Year Immortalized on a New Album

The Day of Doom Live series – featuring the bands who played last year’s festival of dark psychedelic rock at St. Vitus in Greenpoint – continues today with a crushing set by Elephant Tree, streaming at Bandcamp. The British four-piece have more of a sense of humor than most of the bands who play dead-serious heavy psychedelic sounds: listen closely for a couple of great WTF moments.  Said it before, time to say it again: more bands should make live albums, and this is a prime example why.

The groups on the bill weren’t all doom metal acts, either, although Elephant Tree’s stygian fuzztone attack is more evilly chromatic than, say, Horsehunter. They open with Aphotic Blues, which isn’t particularly bluesy but it is anthemic and and hypnotic, the twin guitars of Jack Townley and John Slattery over the heavy sway of bassist Peter Holland and drummer Sam Hart.

The band follow a similar pattern – octaves and simple, sharp blues riffs – in Dawn, with a couple of fat, sustained guitar solos and a goofy wah bass break. The riffage gets slurrier and the guitar strings bend achingly in Wither, down to a bass-and-drums interlude that could be Joy Division at halfspeed.

The textures get fuzzier and denser in Surma, with its downtuned bass intro. Then the group roar and shriek but also get surprisingly quiet for a minimalist bass solo midway through In Suffering.

Likewise, they shift from fuzztone crunch to spare, gloomy folk noir and finally some icy spacerock in the longest song of the set, Attack of the Altaica. They drift through the end of the set with the windswept art-rock waltz Circles, Slattery’s piano awash in a haze of reverb. Much as this is plenty enjoyable to listen to on headphones, wouldn’t it be great to be able to actually be at St. Vitus to feel the bass rattling the roof? In that sweet spot about ten feet past the sound booth, along the wall where the bands stash their gear? Are we really going to resign ourselves to raising a generation of kids who will never experience a blissful moment like that?

Summoner Put Out the Best Heavy Psychedelic Album of 2020

When Summoner recorded their set at the Day of Doom Festival at St. Vitus in Brooklyn last year, were they even planning on releasing it? Did they have any idea that it would turn out to be the best heavy psychedelic rock record of the year?

It’s been desperate times, desperate measures for most artists this year. There’s never been such a deluge of archival live recordings dumped on the web, since studios have been officially put on ice by the lockdowners. Some of those albums are dodgy, but a surprising number are top-shelf and Summoner’s Live at Day of Doom – streaming at Bandcamp – is the best of the bunch. It’s amazing how this band manage to sound so unhinged yet so tight.

No overdubs, no punching in to fix mistakes: they’re in their element, playing through St. Vitus’ magnificently loud (and now tragically silent) PA system to a pretty rapt crowd. What immediately hits you about their performance is the subtle touches. For example, the way frontman Chris Johnson’s bass slithers up into the highs over the fanged guitar riffage of the opening number, Skies of the Unknown. That’s foreshadowing. He’ll do that later, especially toward the end, when he isn’t playing with a gritty, growling tone…or detuning his E string for the slashingly Arabic-tinged Into the Abyss.

Even though Summoner don’t sound much like Iron Maiden or Black Sabbath, you can see they’ve built off those groups’ best ideas to make something completely new. Listen to how guitarists AJ Peters and Joe Richner play their twin leads with a powerglide sleekness on that opening number. They’ll do that again in the evil, slurry chords of The Interloper over drummer Scott Smith’s stampede.

Counterintuitively, the centerpiece of the show is not an upbeat number but a slow, epically spare, almost ten-minute take of Let the Light In. It’s closer to Nektar or Desert Flower than, say, Mastodon, lingering jangle and clang rising to crushing waves. The eerily glimmering tremolo-picking and surreal flanged contrast between Peters and Richner’s guitars will send your natural opiates through the roof.

The chromatics get more sinister in The Prophecy: Johnson’s melodic approach essentially gives the band three lead guitarists. Textures spiral and roar and scream throughout the anthemic, galloping Horns of War. The band wind up the set with Conjuring, their Children of the Grave, with seamonster bass piercing the surface and a tantalizing exchange of solos. Every band this good – and there are hundreds of them around the world – needs to make a live album like this.

Radical Reinventions and Faithful Facsimiles of Black Sabbath Classics

Why on earth would anyone want to hear an album of Black Sabbath covers? If you play heavy music, sure. The new Best of Black Sabbath [Redux] vinyl compilation – streaming at Bandcamp – underscores how imaginatively a good band can reinvent songs that half the world knows by heart more than it serves as a cautionary tale about musical hubris.

A handful of the covers here faithfully replicate the bludgeoning riffs, macabre chromatics and Middle Eastern allusions of the alltime foundational heavy metal band. Take Hippie Death Cult‘s Fairies Wear Boots. It’s perfect. Maybe a little extra drum roll, a little extra digital sustain on the guitars, but otherwise it could really be Sabbath. As anyone who spent their formative years learning this material will tell you, it’s deliriously fun to play. And beyond the fun this band are obviously having with it, what’s the point?

Likewise, Caustic Casanova‘s version of Wicked World is musically spot-on: they absolutely nail the long jam that quickly goes doublespeed, then quadruplespeed. The B-52s vocals are, um, original.

Other versions on the record are subtly altered. Leather Lung give Hole in the Sky a haphazard, wide-angle swing beat, screaming punk rock vocals and a hint of goofy tremolo on the big riffs. Summoner‘s lithely jagged take of A National Acrobat suggests that Tony Iommi might have been listening to P-Funk or Rare Earth before he came up with this one.

Sweet Leaf is what it is – Black Electric’s version sounds even more dense and stoned, and just as funny as the original. A great pickup group consisting of CKY’s Chad Ginsburg, Fireball Ministry guitarist James Rota and bassist Scott Reeder, and drummer Jess Margera do a no-BS take of N.I.B. with another funny moment: they put a talkbox on the bass as they fade it up.

But music that was game-changing at the time tends to reward those who dare change the game even more. Case in point: the version of The Wizard here is a revelation. Mooner completely remake it as heavy latin psychedelia with deliciously trebly bass, sultry vocals and a flute in place of Ozzy’s hyperventilating harmonica.

Similarly, Solace’s Electric Funeral has a bone-chilling, whispery, Doors/Frank Flight Band vibe fueled by tremolo organ and jangly guitar, although they can’t resist bringing in the heavy artillery here and there. Howling Giant‘s Lord of This World also has a little organ, smartly shifting textures and clever references to another Sabbath classic (which isn’t included on the album, maybe because it was covered, awfully, by Blondie).

Slowly developing their cover of Solitude out of minimalist cello-driven art-rock works hauntingly for Brume. Elephant Tree‘s decision to remake Paranoid as bizarrely atmospheric sludgecore also pays off heavily. Building their version of Sleeping Village around a hypnotically cantering, opiated groove turns out to be a big score for Saint Karloff.

Rwit is an unexpected and solid choice of cover tune; Rwake‘s practically ten-minute version has a bizarre contrast between expertly layered, understatedly menacing guitars and screamo vocals.

There are a couple of duds here. The idea to make Kristin Hersh-style dreampop out of Planet Caravan was brave, but it never rises above the level of generic. And Never Say Die is an awful song that sounds like Thin Lizzy and shouldn’t have made the cut.

Beware of Greeks Bearing Loud Guitar Amps

Balothizer are among the most recent heavy psychedelic bands to realize how delicious haunting old Greek folk tunes sound when you crank up the volume and hit the distortion pedal. The obvious comparison is New York’s own Greek Judas, who, like Batholizer, are one of the few rock acts releasing new material these days. Check out the Brooklynites’ latest single, Snakey Song, which is probably the most succinct number in their repertoire of heavy metal versions of hash-smoking and protest songs from the 1920s and 30s..

Balothizer have a whole new album, Cretan Smash, streaming at Bandcamp. The eerie Arabic-influenced chromatics and fearless pro-freedom content of music from Crete are everywhere here, starting with the epic, defiant first track, Jegaman, kicking off with a slashing cadenza from guest violinist Stratos Skarakis. Frontman Nikos Ziarkas multitracks sizzling electric lute riffs over Pav Mav’s gritty, galloping bass and Steve J. Payne’s pummeling drums as the song veers between speedmetal and a slow, relentlessly doomy sway.

The second track is Peace, a slow, grimly stomping anthem until the shreddy stampede out. You want grim? The third number, Aleppo – a bitter exile’s tale – gets reinvented as sort of Greek Motorhead, but with more of a hypnotically propulsive drive, while the fourth, Ponente Levante, a vengeful chronicle of finding nothing but trouble in the world, has an even faster, circling attack.

Foustalieris, a popular tune with a witheringly metaphorical revolutionary message, has elegantly echoey acoustic twin lutes to kick things off, then the band barrel through to a long wah-wah stoner jam. They close the record with their most epic number here, Anathema, a shoegazy slowcore tune. Watch for this on the best albums of 2020 page at the end of the year.

Greek Judas – Snakey Song

The Vol. 4 Redux Compilation: Better Than the Black Sabbath Original?

The Vol. 4 album is where Black Sabbath started to go to hell. That was where Sabbath first ventured out of the doom metal they’d singlehandedly invented, toward a bludgeoning take on art-rock and FM radio-oriented heavy pop tunesmithing, with uneven results.

Maybe it was the demands of the record label, a new album every year becoming an impossible task as far as maintaining the insanely high creativity of their first three records. That job proved to be too much for just about every band from the radio-and-records era, so it’s probably not fair to fault the godfathers of heavy metal for dropping off the fourth time around.

So if you’re going to cover a Sabbath album, it makes sense to do this one.

Seriously – does anybody really want to hear somebody like Zakk Wylde put the bite on, and tap, and divebomb his way through a cartoon copy of the iconic first Sabbath record?

That’s why the new vinyl compilation Vol. 4 Redux – streaming at Bandcamp – is worth owning if metal or heavy psychedelia is your thing. it’s better than the original. Ten different bands take turns, some of them completely reinventing these songs, others just adding their own inspired and often amusing touches. Interestingly, pretty much all the vocalists seem to be shooting for Ozzy impersonations, and pretty much every band’s drummer rises to the challenge of nailing the great, underrated Bill Ward’s nimbly swinging attack.

Wheels of Confusion, by Thou  begins as brittle death metal that warms up with the long fuzztone jam at the end. Tomorrow’s Dream, by the Obsessed, is both fuzzier and more haphazard than the original – and closer to the way Sabbath would play it live. On one hand, the sonics of Vol. 4 are luscious: on the other hand, it’s more dense and, let’s admit it, slickly produced than the first three records.

The track that no band in their right mind would want to have to cover, obviously, is Changes. Yet High Reeper defy the odds, reinventing it as gritty doom metal: no keyboards on this one. FX, the dissociative free jazz-scape, gets a wry, quote-filled riff-fest of a remake by Sleep guitar icon Matt Pike.

The closest thing to the original here is Spirit Adrift‘s inspired, straight-up cover of Supernaut, complete with space-bubble sonics before the last verse. Green Lung‘s version of Snowblind takes the original to the next level, thanks to John Wright’s smoky roto organ and guitarist Tom Templar’s lighter, twin lead-fueled touch.

Whores blend sludgy menace and loopy whippit guitar in a slow, tarpit take of Cornucopia: let’s face it, the original was little more than a hodgepodge of riffs. The big surprise here is Mos Generator mastermind Tony Reed’s starkly elegant, baroquely orchestral version of Laguna Sunrise.

Haunt‘s St. Vitus Dance, for what it’s worth, gets a machinegunning attack that sounds a lot like Molly Hatchet. After all this, the macabre chromatics, funereal gallop and surgically unhinged guitars of Zakk Sabbath‘s Under the Sun is a surprisingly serious and mighty payoff.

Yet Another Brain-Warping Brown Acid Compilation

One high point of putting together the annual, monthlong Halloween celebration here every October is that there always seems to be a new edition in the Brown Acid compilation series that’s just out. There are now eleven different playlists, all of them available on vinyl. The series started as a sort of Nuggets for obscure proto-metal singles but quickly branched out to include latin soul and other sounds from across the psychedelic universe, from epic art-rock to novelty songs. The latest in the series is Brown Acid, Volume 11, streaming at Bandcamp.

This is a rare one where you’re going to want to skip the third-rate Hendrix ripoff that opens it. Instead, freak out with I’ll Give You Love, a hard funk tune by the irresistibly named Boston band Grump. It’s a lot closer to James Brown than Rare Earth – and it’s so rare that the compilers can only estimate that it came out around 1969.

Bagshot Row, from the heavy rock mecca of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, contribute Turtle Wax Blues, a tightly sizzling blast of acid rock riffage from 1973. Fifty years after he released the fuzztone riff-rock single Diamond Lady, Milwaukee’s Larry Lynn is still active – or was, anyway, before the lockdown.

Renaissance Fair hailed from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, where in 1968 they recorded the bludgeoning avant garde garage song In Wyrd. Wyrd is an understatement – it sounds like a heavier version of the Fugs.

One of the best of the rediscovered bands in the Brown Acid series is fiery, politically-inspired Chicago band Zendik. The witheringly sarcastic Mom’s Apple Pie Boy, with echoes of the MC5, is the high point of this particular playlist. Just Can’t Stay, released in 1977 by San Mateo, California’s Daybreak is a AC/DC homage, while Fort Dodge, Iowa’s West Minist’r are represented by the Blue Oyster Cult-influenced 1975 boogie I Want You.

Debb Johnson, from Saint Louis Park, Minnesota is not a singer-songwriter but a seven-piece band with a horn section. Their 1969 single Dancing in the Ruin is a politically-fueled, Rare Earth-inspired heavy funk tune. The album comes full circle with the woozy, coyly amusing faux-Hendrix of New York guitarist Jerry Ciccone f.k.a. Crazy Jerry’s Every Girl Gets One.

Obscure Heavy Psychedelia Rescued From Vietnam War-Era Obscurity – For the Tenth Time

The great thing about the Brown Acid compilations is that there are a ton of unbelievable rare treasures amid the obscure singles by marginally talented bands who did their best to imitate Cream, Led Zep, the MC5 or Uriah Heep. Yet while pretty much all these bands rescured from obscurity over the course of the series’ ten volumes sound high on one thing or another, ultimately they have one thing in common: they embraced freedom.

All but one of the songs on the new anthology Brown Acid: The Tenth Trip – streaming at Riding Easy Records – were made in the US during the Vietnam War. The privileged kids whose parents could afford to put them through college to escape the draft weren’t making music that sounded much like this. Acid rock was a working-class subculture, created by musicians who were in danger of being drafted into a war that virtually all of them opposed. There’s only one overtly political song on this record, but let’s not forget that songs which openly endorsed drug use identifed their makers as subversive. This music was more radical than most people today realize.

The first track, Tensions, is by Flint, Michigan band Sounds Synonymous. With slinky organ and fuzztone guitar, it’s basically a one-chord jam  til the chorus. The haphazard doublespeed outro is a classic 1969 stoner touch.

Instead of accelerating, Louisville’s Conception follow a similar pattern with their 1969 single Babylon, with cheap amps, a phaser and a slow blues jam that appears out of nowhere. California band Ralph Williams and the Wright Brothers’ Never Again is a hard blues recorded in mono – three years later.

Atlanta band Bitter Creek’s 1970 recording Plastic Thunder has MC5 snarl and ominous lyrics that reflect the turbulence of the era: it’s one of the album’s best songs. New Orleans group Rubber Memory’s All Together – a ramshackle Vietnam War plea for solidarity – is one of the longscale gems these anthologies are best know for, slinking along with fuzztone bass, wah-wah scratch guitar, and a bridge from nowhere to basically nowhere as well.

First State Bank put out the impressively multitracked, scampering riff-rocker Mr. Sun in that same year. The album’s lone novelty song, Brothers and One’s Hard On Me is a pretty obvious dirty joke (say the title slowly and you’ll get it).

Tucson’s Frozen Sun contribute a Hendrix ripoff with super-spacy lyrics, followed by the album’s most hilarious song, The Roach, a 1969 stoner classic by Alabama band the Brood. “Leave him around for when you begin to come down,” their singer rasps over wahs and organ and a weird white noise loop: is that supposed to be somebody toking hard?.

The album’s final cut is Tabernash’s Head Collect, a surreal 1969 mashup of the Beatles and mid-60s Pretty Things.

It’s unthinkable that any of the bands in the ten-album series could have made this music while wearing masks and standing six feet from each other. Folks, this lockdown bullshit is never going to end unless we put an end to it. It’s time to mobilize.