Iconic Heavy Psychedelic Band Revisit Deep Cuts With Surprising Results

Can you imagine if Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper made its debut on corporate radio in 2020? The politically correct crowd would crash Instagram with all their outraged selfie vids. “I can’t believe you’d be so irresponsible as to play a song that ADVOCATES TEEN SUICIDE!!!!!”

The band, of course, leave it open to multiple interpretations: it could just as easily be about drugs..or a love song, heh heh heh. And it’s a far cry from their best work: for that, you need to dig into their first four records. Over that initial span of releases, there is no other act in the history of rock music who were better.

Not the Stones, who weren’t ready for prime time. Not the Beatles, although they get an asterisk because their manager and record label held them back. Not the Dream Syndicate (who got screwed even worse by their label), the Velvets (who couldn’t pull their shit together, basically), the Stooges (who learned on the fly), Pink Floyd (who had to regroup after their bandleader self-destructed), the Dead Kennedys (whose second album was awful), David Bowie (who got off to a bad start) or Richard Thompson (ever try listening to Henry the Human Fly?). And as revolutionary and brilliant as the first four albums by Elvis Costello, the Jam, the Clash, X, Parliament/Funkadelic and several others are, Blue Oyster Cult’s classic early stuff is just as strong, and smart, and sometimes a lot funnier.

So why would this blog cover something as crazy as the band’s new recording, a 40th anniversary celebration of their uneven 1976 Agents of Fortune album, recorded live in concert in 2016 and streaming at Spotify? Because it’s just plain preposterous. Right off the bat, this isn’t even the same band that made the original: the Bouchard brothers’ rhythm section disintegrated back in the 80s, and we lost the great Allen Lanier a couple of decades later. Still, this is actually an improvement on the original!

Frontman/guitarist Eric Bloom, once a fine, clear-voice singer, doesn’t do much more than rasp these days. But lead guitarist Buck Dharma still has his chops here, and the replacements are clearly psyched to play a lot of material that these days falls into the deep-cuts category. There’s snap to the bass, a leadfoot groove but a groove nonetheless from the drums, and a lot of swirly organ.

They open with This Ain’t the Summer of Love, a riffy anti-hippie anthem that isn’t much more than rehashed Stones….but they seem to be having fun with it. They can’t do much with True Confessions, an ill-advised attempt at mashing up that sound with doo-woppy soul. Although Bloom can’t hit the high notes in the ominously circling hit single, and the band must be sick to death of it, they manage not to phone it in. “Forty thousand men and women coming every day!” State of the world, 2020, huh?

This edition of the band’s take of the “classic rock” radio staple E.T.I. (Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) isn’t as quite as offhandedly macabre as the original, but it still has a gleefully sinister ring. The Revenge of Vera Gemini – which original keyboardist Lanier co-wrote with his girlfriend at the time, Patti Smith – is heavier and a lot more menacing.

Dharma’s icy chromatics can’t quite elevate Sinful Love above the level of generically strutting powerpop. Likewise, Tattoo Vampire is a second-rate Led Zep ripoff. Morning Final, a haphazard attempt to blend Lou Reed urban noir and latin soul as the Stones did it on Sticky Fingers, is so bizarre it’s pretty cool.

From there the band segue into Tenderloin: disco-pop was not their forte. They wind up the record, and the show, with Debbie Denise: what an understatedly bittersweet, profoundly Lynchian pop song! A sparse audience cheer enthusiastically afterward.

Psychedelic Rock Icon With Inspired Band Picks Up Gloriously Where He Left Off

What can a person do at night in a place that suddenly became the City That Always Sleeps?

You could pick up your instrument, or sit down at it, and write something.

If you gravitate toward big, ornate sounds, you could tune in to the New York Philharmonic’s live webcast.

Or you could watch James Tonkin‘s new concert film Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets: Live at the Roadhouse. It hasn’t hit VOD yet, but the audio is streaming at Spotify. This isn’t just your ordinary Pink Floyd cover band: “There’s so many thousands, all playing the same four albums,” guitarist Gary Kemp smirks. “The first thing that will be really telling will be to see how they change their setlists as a result of us doing this!”

What differentiates these guys from the wannabes is that they play exclusively pre-Dark Side material from the Syd Barrett and early David Gilmour eras. They also managed to convince Floyd’s iconic drummer to join them. After a few well-received shows, they had this frequently glorious concert immortalized, at a venue where the Barrett edition of the band were the first group to play.

To open the show, Telecaster player Kemp picks hard on his low E string, second Tele player Lee Harris launches into the evil, chromatic descending riff of the instrumental Interstellar Overdrive, then bassist Guy Pratt – playing a snappy Rickenbacker – joins the song along with organist Dom Beken and the bandleader…and they’re off. In general, throughout the concert, the music has a tighter, somewhat lighter-fingered pulse than the reckless abandon of the Syd Barrett era. The songs also tend to be more ornate, but in a lot of ways the additional layers raise the psychedelic factor. Who wants to hear a band play something exactly as it was recorded, anyway?

Jim Parsons’ classic rock-doc production is purist: lots of fretboard close-ups, panning the stage and then back. The sound mix is tastefully oldschool as well. To his infinite credit, the bandleader is toward the back, just as he was throughout Pink Floyd’s tenure: he’s always been a guy to let the sound out of his kit instead of trying to bang something into it. And what a big kit it is. One of his bandmates remarks that even in his seventies, Mason’s vigor is “terrifying.” Maybe his subtlety has something to do with that.

Tellingly, it takes two guitarists to replicate what both Barrett and Gilmour did, with plenty of noise and echo, closer to the former’s style than the latter’s anguished, Hendrix-inspired existential screams. Likewise, Beken has a Rick Wright-sized array of textures at his disposal, orchestrating the music with more of an overtly trippy ripple and twinkle than just the vast deep-space textures the late, great Pink Floyd keyboardist constructed so expertly.

The group segue into Astronomy Domine after the night’s opening jagged surrealism: this song is a little more bluesy than the original, but practically just as crazed in places, the bass obviously higher than that instrument typically was recorded in 1967 when Roger Waters played it. Lucifer Sam and Arnold Layne seem a little fast. and rotely digital; yet that same approach improves Fearless, underscoring that otherwise gentle pastoral pop tune’s druggy narrative.

The woozy instrumentals Obscured by Clouds and When You’re In seem odd choices, little more than a platform for Kemp’s simple slide work. As does Vegetable Man, considering what happened to Barrett. In that context, the “why can’t we reach the sun” refrain in Remember a Day has special poignancy, a cautionary tale to the extreme.

While Kemp stays on key more than Waters did singing If, the gloomily sunbaked madness anthem, Waters’ acid-damaged vocals are stil missed. As are the horns and orchestra of Atom Heart Mother – at least we get about seven minutes of the majestic main theme, emphasis on the macabre.

The proto-metal of The Nile Song holds up well (and foreshadows a famous Johnny Rotten lyric). The alien-encounter anthem Let There Be More Light has an almost gleefully grim intensity; likewise, the bulked-up version of the rarely played Gilmour narrative Childhood’s End is more richly dark.

The show’s centerpiece, the menacingly raga-influenced Set the Controls For the Heart of the Sun, has a literally breathtaking vastness, Mason having a wryly good time with his huge gongs and then his mallets on the toms. The band pick up the pace with the hauntingly bittersweet See Emily Play, romp through Barrett’s mid 60s Carnaby Street pop tune Bike, then hammer their way through One of These Days, Waters’ strobe-lit repeaterbox instrumental from the Meddle album.

Fueled by Beken’s funereal chromatics and enveloping, smoky echoes, the band go way down the rabbit hole with A Saucerful of Secrets and end the show triumphantly with Point Me At the Sky. The film also contains a few snippets of live footage from the Barrett years plus a bit of context from individual band members. Who would have thought that in 2020, anyone would attempt, let alone succeed in revisiting these classic sounds?

A Killer Heavy Psych Quadruplebill on the Lower East on the 18th

EDITOR’S NOTE – THIS SHOW IS NOW CANCELLED

The doomy heavy psychedelic quadruplebill at Arlene’s on March 18 starting at 8 PM might be the best lineup to ever play that venue – and that includes the club’s glory days in the late 90s as the place where bands built a following, then moved up to the Mercury and the Knitting Factory. Sleeping Village, Grass, Grandpa Jack and finally Shadow Witch all work the same creepy, bludgeoning, gloomy turf, with more or less psychedelic results: it’s a lot of music, but it’s all worth hearing. Cover is ten bucks.

The smartest one of these acts, businesswise anyway, is Grass, the 9 PM band. Their debut album Fresh Grass is up at Bandcamp as a free download. Those downloads don’t last, so if you like heavy music, snag it now. This Brooklyn trio are closer to heavy blues than straight-up doom metal; they like hooks and don’t waste notes.

The album’s opening two-parter, Amnesia/My Wall starts out as a ponderous, loopy heavy blues tune, then the band pick it up with more of a stoner boogie feel. About three and a half minutes in, we get a jugular-slicing pickslide, then a fragmentary guitar solo. The guitarist (uncredited on the Bandcamp page) throws in some paint-peeling wah-wah a little later on.

The second track, Black Clouds is a variation on the opening theme: flangy bass intro, catchy hard-hitting riffage, refreshingly unpretentious vocals and totally 80s goth lyrics. After that, Fire comes across as Sabbath in midtempo heavy blues mode – especially with that classic quote toward the end.

The heavy funereal drums come up in the mix in Runaway; finally we get a tantalizingly screechy wah guitar solo before the band bring it way down to the bass and drums. The last track, Easy Rider could be a Syd Barrett proto-metal tune, at least in the beginning before the bass starts bubbling like a tarpit and another hazy, hallucinatory wah guitar solo appears. There are probably a million bands out there who sounds like this – and that’s a good thing. What a great time to be alive.

Deliciously Gloomy, Heavy Epics From Brume

Brume is French for “fog.” How nebulous is their album Rabbits, streaming at Bandcamp? Not particularly. The San Francisco power trio like epic dirges and relentlessly gloomy themes, shifting from distantly devastated minimalism to a grimly majestic roar. Frontwoman/bassist Susie McMullan channels every dark emotion from pensive melancholy to raw rage to full-throttle desperation while Jordan Perkins-Lewis’ drums push the band ominously behind her

The first track, Despondence begins slow and desolate with a spare exchange of echoey guitar figures from axeman Jamie McCathie. There’s absolutely nothing about this sad girl-down-the-well tableau that hints at the deliciously familiar, doomy chromatics the band will finally hit a couple minutes later. This could be a gem of a track from the time Randi Russo was leading a scorching band rather than painting fulltime.

The second track, Scurry does anything but that: it’s almost as epic and more enveloping. Hypnotically quavery cello and macabre piano mingle as Blue Jay gets underway; it’s the most plaintive, classically flavored track here.

Lingering deep-space guitar over staggering drums introduce the eleven-minute Lament: it could be the great lost track from Siouxie & the Banshees’ Join Hands album. The final cut is the only slightly less vast Autocrat’s Foot. “Carry your bones to the throne, prop up the king who rules in misery,” McMullan intones over desolately rumbling Joy Division ambience, then the crush of the guitar and bass raise the horror. One of the most interesting and individualistic albums of recent months.

A Welcome Return by What’s Left of 70s Psychedelic Legends Nektar

Nektar were one of the greatest psychedelic rock bands of the 70s, sort of the missing link between Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. Forty years before crowds of thousands were taking to the streets to protest corporate-fueled global warming, Nektar were putting out records with sidelong, acid-inspired cautionary tales about eco-disaster. After the band’s arguably best and ironically most hopeful album, Recyled, frontman/guitarist Roye Albrighton left. A lacklustre 2004 reunion cd, The Prodigal Stranger, was followed by an unexpectedly transcendent tour, reaffirming that they were still a mesmerizing live act.

Albrighton died three years ago. Since then, bassist Mo Moore and Ron Howden – one of the edgiest and most distinctive rhythm sections of their era – pulled another band together under the Nektar name, adding two guitarists – Randy Dembo and Ryche Chlanda – along with keyboardist Kendall Scott, whose textures match original organist Taff Freeman’s  mghty grandeur. The result is a new album, The Other Side, which hasn’t hit the web yet but turns out to be surprisingly fresh and invigorated. Even if it’s loaded with riffs nicked from Pink Floyd, Steely Dan and the group’s first incarnation.

The presence of Albrighton looms immensely over this record, from its innumerable baroque-tinged cascades, to the flaring guitar codas his songs would peak out with. And he had his hand in some of the material on the record, notably Devil’s Door, which opens with his own solo taken from a 1974 concert soundboard recording. The songs are a mix of lavish epics with lofty peaks and desolate valleys, themes morphing into different shapes like an Escher mobius woodcut.

The album opens with a nine-minute tour de force, I’m On Fire, a triumphant, galumphing dinosaur rock anthem that strikes a balance between the baroque and Led Zep, with a bridge that goes from balmy to Pink Floyd Wall grit It’s amazing how vital the rhythm section still is: Moore has the snap and crackle that elevated him above most of the other bassists of his era, and Howden negotiates whatever tricky directions the songs take with typical heavyfooted elegance.

SkyWriter is a a broodingly catchy ballad that Chlanda originally worked up with the band in 1978. I’s closer to ELO than, say, the Dead, with a minimalist Procol Harum-ish organ solo and a searing, Albrightonesque guitar break. The album’s most gargantuan creation is the diptych Love Is/The Other Side, an eighteen-minute monstrosity that begins as a pharaphrase of the Alan Parsons Project’s Eye in the Sky with George Harrison slide guitar grafted on. The segue into the title track raisies the energy a little, shifting back and forth between an orchestral 70s psychedelic sound – Pink Floyd’s Dogs is an obvious reference point – and slicker 80s chorus-box guitar sonics. An unexpected neoromantic piano interlude signals an eventual break in the clouds.

Drifting, a mostly instrumental number in 9/4 time, is another Animals-era Floyd knockoff. Albrighton’s gentle, pastoral intro doesn’t hint at the syncopated 7/4 pulse that Devil’s Door will hit – it’s a shock this metaphorically charged anthem didn’t make it onto a Nektar album, live or in the studio, in its heyday. Scott’s high-beamed, richly textured keys here are one of the album’s high points.

They follow the Synergy-istic keyboard soundscape The Light Beyond with the sweeping, unsettled folk-rock vistas of Look Through Me, Dembo’s twelve-string acoustic guitar front and center. They close the album with Y Can’t I B More Like U, a late Beatlesque ballad that they eventually take bouncing down the hobbit trail. Good to see these guys still vital after all these years.

Sarah Pagé Plays Hypnotically Catchy, Shimmery Psychedelia on the Concert Harp

From the droning oscillations of the title track of Sarah Pagé’s new album Dose Curves, growing increasingly metallic, shedding overtones like a circular saw cutting sheet metal, it’s hard to imagine how she could create such a vortex with a harp. Electronics are obviously a big part of the picture; still, this collection of instrumental nocturnes – streaming at Bandcamp – is one of the most imaginative psychedelic records in recent memory.

From the opening drone, Pagé segues into the hypnotically loopy, austerely folky Stasis:, reverb way up in the mix, her spacious plucking sometimes resembling a steel guitar, sometimes an Indian veena.

Simple, organ-like pitch-shifting harmonies permeate Lithium Taper, all the way through to a teenage wasteland of the harp (old people who listen to “classic rock” radio will get that joke). Rippling without a pause into Ephemeris, she loops a galloping phrase and builds constellations of bright, tersely attractive riffage around it. Ever wonder if a harp could echo like a Fender Rhodes piano? Here’s your answer.

The album closes with Pagé’s most epic cut, Pleaides, a softly pulsing deep-space raga, akin to a sitar drifting gently further and further from earth to the point where the vastness becomes terrifying. This isn’t just great atmospheric music: it’s great Indian music. What a strange and beautiful record.

A Slinky, Danceable Debut Album and a Comfortable Barbes Show by Psychedelic Cumbia Supergroup Locobeach

Brooklyn psychedelic cumbia legends Chicha Libre may have resurrected themselves with a bang earlier this year, but they’d been on a long hiatus. That’s where Locobeach stepped in to fill that enormous void. Keyboardist Josh Camp and conguero Neil Ochoa brought their Chicha Libre cred and vast immersion in trippy, surfy 1960s and 70s Peruvian sounds, joined by guitar wizard José Luis Pardo of Los Crema Paraiso and Los Amigos Invisibles. Bassist Edward Marshall and timbalero/drummer Fernando Valladares ended up filling out the picture.  Locobeach’s debut album Psychedelic Disco Cumbia is streaming at Bandcamp; they’re playing their home base, Barbes (of course) on Nov 18 at around 9:30 PM.

The first cut on the new record, Dream of the Bellflower is a mashup of woozily texture keyboard-driven psychedelic cumbia and tightly wound new wave funk with a big stadium rock bridge. The second track, Mira Quien Llego has an elegant, bittersweet, almost classically tinged minor-key groove: with gruffer vocals, it could pass for Chicha Libre.

Six on the Stairway to 7 is a dead ringer for Los Crema Paraiso’s cinematic motorway instrumentals, fueled by Pardo’s variously textured guitar multitracks. Guaracheo has even more of a straight-up retro disco pulse, lit up by Pardo’s wry, slurry slide work and Camp’s wah-wah keys.

The album’s only really epic track is Javelin, almost eight minutes of midtempo, hypnotic, syncopated clave soul, metaphorically saluting indigenous and immigrant rights in the era of Trumpie nutjobs and their enablers. Success on the Dancefloor, part P-Funk, part synthy 80s chicha, is a lot more lighthearted.

The band mash up new wave pop, swirly Peruvian chicha and a little dub in Devil Is a Charmer. The big hit, and most straight-up cumbia here is Rata, a venomous dis with some classic, trippy, reverb-drenched keyboard work from Camp. The band go back to loopy disco with Kalakapapanga and close out the album with Introduced, a loping folk-rock song set to a cumbia beat. Until Chicha Libre (or Los Crema Paraiso) put out a new record, this one will do just fine.

A Slyly Cinematic Instrumental Album and a Rockwood Residency From Henry Hey

Multi-instrumentalist Henry Hey may be best know these days for his David Bowie collaborations,  notably as musical director for the stage productions of Lazarus, but he somehow finds the time to lead his own band. The latest album, simply titled Four, by his Forq quartet with guitarist Chris McQueen, bassist Kevin Scott and drummer Jason Thomas is streaming at Bandcamp. It’s their most colorful and cinematic release yet. Hey has a weekly 9 PM Monday night residency this month, with special guests at each show, at the small room at the Rockwood, where he’ll be next on Nov 11 and you can expect to hear at least some of this live.

The album’s first track is Mr. Bort. a ridiculously woozy Bernie Worrell/P-Funk style strut employing a slew of cheesy late 70s/early 80s keyboard patches – it sounds like a parody. The second track, Grifter is an epic  – it shifts from a techy update on early 60s samba-surf, to slit-eyed Hollywood hills boudoir soul, Tredici Bacci retro Italian cinematics and finally a noir conversation between twelve-string guitar and synth.

M-Theory is sternly swooshy outer space drama in an early 80s ELO vein, followed by Duck People, a return to wry portamento stoner funk with a jovially machinegunning faux-harpsichord solo out. Lullabye, the album’s most expansive track, has loopy faux-soukous followed by Hey playing postbop synth over a long drum crescendo, then a startrooper theme and a bit of second-line New Orleans.

Likewise, Tiny Soul morphs into and out of hard funk from a chipper, Jim Duffy-style psychedelic pop stroll. The band go back to brightly circling, buoyantly orchestrated Afro-pop with Rally, then bring back the wah funk with EAV.

After a brief, warpy reprise from Lullabye, the band channel Rick James with the catchy Times Like These. The last track is Whelmed, a funny riff-rock spoof: imagine what Avi Fox-Rosen would have done with it if he was a weedhead. Somewhere there is a hip-hop group, a video game franchise, an action flick or stoner buddy comedy that could use pretty much everything on this record.

Fun (or not so fun) fact: Hey takes the B.B. King memorial ironman award here for most macho performance while injured. Two sets of jazz at the piano with a broken thumb, lots of solos and not a single grimace. Can’t tell you where or with who because the injury could have been costlhy if anybody had known at the time.

Multistylistic, Psychedelic Dance Grooves and a Midtown Release Show From Dawn Drake & ZapOte

Dawn Drake & ZapOte are a blazing horn-driven band who play just about every style of dance music you could want. Afrobeat? Check. Salsa? Doublecheck. Hard funk? Word. Ethiopiques? Kind of. They’re as psychedelic as they are stylistically diverse, and frontwoman Drake is the rare bassist across all those styles who likes incisive lowdown riffs and makes those notes count without overplaying. The band’s new album Nightshade isn’t out officially yet and is due up momentarily at her Bandcamp page They’re playing the release show in a more sit-downy place than usual for them, Club Bonafide, on Nov 8 at 10 PM. Cover is $15.

The album opens with Oya de Zarija, Mara Rosenbloom’s langorous electric piano over a trip-hop sway and elegantly layered polyrhythmic percussion: a stoner soul jam, more or less. The first of the Afrobeat numbers is Shoulda Never, a miniature that the band reprise toward the end of the record. Chi Chi’s Afrobeat, the album’s longest joint, is especially catchy, with a tantalizingly brief Maria Eisen sax break and dubby keys.

Ethwaap is just as anthemic, a vampy minor-key tune wryly flavored with P-Funk psychedelic keyb flourishes and a spiraling flute solo. Zim ta Tim is a slinky slice of tropicalia, kicking off with surreal, baroque-tinged vocal harmonies.

Drake mashes up cumbia with soca in Salon de Coiffure (i.e. Hair Salon), with a thicket of bright Eliane Amherd guitar multitracks. Likewise, the kiss-off anthem Judgment Rumba is part roots reggae, part oldschool salsa dura. The album’s best track is the East African-flavored Puriya Makuta, with a Bob Marley Exodus pulse, brief, purposeful solos from Eisen’s sax and Jackie Coleman’s trumpet, and the group’s dubbiest interlude.

Bunny’s Jam turns out to be a return to concise Afrobeat – imagine that, wow! The group stay on the Afrobeat tip to wind up the album with the Wake Up Remix, a fiery, organ-driven, apocalyptic cautionary tale. Great party record; play it loud.

 

Yet Another Brilliant, Shadowy Album and a Gowanus Release Show From Noir Instrumental Icons Big Lazy

Big Lazy are the world’s most menacingly cinematic instrumental trio. They’re also the world’s darkest jamband, one of Brooklyn’s most popular dance bands…and they keep putting out brilliant albums. The cover of their long-awaited new one, Dear Trouble (streaming at youtube) has a 1972 Ford Country Squire station wagon off to the side of a desolate road somewhere in the midwest, facing a tower along the powerline as the clouds linger and the sun sets. That says a lot. They’re playing the album release show this Nov 8-9 at 8 PM at the old American Can Company building at 232 3rd St. in Gowanus. Night one is sold out, but night two isn’t yet; you can get in for $20. They’ll be joined by three of the special guests on the record: Sexmob‘s Steven Bernstein on trumpet, Slavic Soul Party’s Peter Hess on saxes and Miramar’s Farfisa sorceress Marlysse Rose Simmons. Take the F or the R to 4th Ave/9th St.

Interestingly, this turns out to be the band’s quietest, most desolate album. It begins with The Onliest, a loping, skeletal theme slinking along on Andrew Hall’s hypnotically bluesy bassline. They hit an interlude bristling with bandleader/guitarist Steve Ulrich’s signature, macabre chromatics, then eventually a false ending. It’s a good introduction to where the band are at now: there are echoes of horror surf, Angelo Badalementi David Lynch soundtracks, Thelonious Monk and Booker T. & the MGs in the rhythm, although Big Lazy’s sound is inimitably their own.

The album’s title track has Ulrich’s melancholy, resonant lead over a sardonically strutting blend of Nino Rota tinged with early 60s pop: if Tredici Bacci wanted to get really dark, they might sound like this. As is the case with so much of Ulrich’s catalog, the song takes on many different shapes, textures and guitar timbres and winds up far from where it started.

Ramona, with dubby accents from Simmons organ, is one of the spare, overcast bolero-ish tunes that Ulrich writes so well. Cardboard Man features Marc Ribot, a rare guitarist who can go as deep into noir as well as Ulrich, adding eerily flamenco-tinged touches. The exchanges between the two, switching in a split-second between styles, are expertly bittersweet.

Sizzle & Pops – referring to the imaginary roadhouse that Ulrich and his wife would be running in an alternate universe – is a rare moment of straight-up levity for this band, part Booker T, part pseudo Bill Black Combo 50s cheese. Bernstein adds distantly muted New Orleans flavor, both jaundiced and jubilant, on the group’s cover of the Beatles’ Girl: who knew what an ineffably sad song this was!

Drummer Yuval Lion takes the loose-limbed slink of the opening number and raises it several notches with his flurries in Dream Factory as Hall runs another trancey blues bassline, Ulrich’s baritone guitar pulling the song deeper into the shadows. Consider how the title of Cheap Crude could mean many things, and its sardonic rockabilly makes even more sense.

Exit Tucson, another tense, morose quasi-bolero, has all kinds of neat, rippling touches pinging through the sonic picture around Ulrich’s sad broken chords, disconsolately reverberating riffs and long, forlornly shuffling solo. The arguably even more gloomy Fly Paper has a deliciously disorienting blend of tone-bending lapsteel and furtive guitar multitracks: with its trick ending, it’s the most Twin Peaks of any of the songs here.

Ribot returns for Mr. Wrong, a disquietingly syncopted stroll: it’s amazingly how chameleonic yet grimly on task both he and Ulrich are here. The album’s final cut is Sing Sing, Peter Hess’ baritone sax adding extra smoke beneath Ulrich’s lingering, macabre tritones.

Ulrich and Big Lazy are no strangers to the best albums of the year page here. He took first place back in 2012 for the Ulrich Ziegler record, a quasi-Big Lazy album with guitarist/bassist Itamar Ziegler, which turned out to be a one-off project before he reformed the group.. And Big Lazy’s big comeback album, Don’t Cross Myrtle, was #1 with a bullet for 2014. As far as 2019 is concerned, no spoilers, check back here at the end of December…