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…

A Smoky, Careening Free Download From Heavy Psychedelic Band Salem’s Bend

Today’s Halloween month installment is Cold Hand Live, a free ep download by LA heavy psychedelic power trio Salem’s Bend. There are just two tracks here. The first is the nine-minute Cold Hand, a slowly swaying doom theme in 6/8 time, guitarist Bobby Parker’s muffled vocals over Kevin Schofield’s bass and Zach Huling’s drums. It doesn’t take long before Parker picks up with a jagged, Hendrix-inspired attack. Then Schofield hits his distortion pedal; Parker takes the song from spare and hypnotic, through a brief salute to classic Sabbath to a screaming, bleeding solo out.

The second track is Winter Sunn, with its suspenseful pulse, sharply executed 70s stoner riffs and comet-trail guitar solos. Grab this while you can.

A Searing Live Album From Heavy Psych Band Holy Grove Disappears Without a Trace…and Then Returns

Holy Grove‘s Live from the World Famous Kenton Club is the latest example of why more great bands should make live albums. Who wouldn’t want to see these heavy psychedelic monsters after hearing it? Live, they’ve got one of the slinkiest rhythm sections of anybody in the heavy arena, and they sound a lot bigger than a mere four-piece. Frontwoman Andrea Vidal’s darkly bluesy vocals instantly give this band one of the most distinctive sounds in metal and heavy psych.

Drummer Eben Travis’ flurries add cynical energy to the first track, Blade Born, a slowly swaying early 70s-style riff-rocker. Bassist Gregg Emley holds the song together with a slow boom as guitarist Trent Jacobs sears through a thicket of triplets, then takes a turn toward Sabbath menace and finally a hallucinatory nitrous hailstorm.

Death of Magic is more of an early Led Zep style number, Vidal’s resonantly ominous vocals emerging above the circling, growling riffage. Jacobs finally hits his wah and shreds; this band sounds much larger than a mere four-piece.

Caravan has a galloping, chromatically evil Sabbath groove, phaser guitar and an unhinged, squirrelly solo out. “All right, guys, we’re gonna do a Grateful Dead cover,” Vidal deadpans, cutting loose with a raw, sustained, wailing intensity over the band’s slow, twistedly crescendoing chromatic drive in the eight-minute Nix. They close the album with the even more epic Cosmos, Emley finally turning off the fuzz. “Nothingness again,” Vidalwails, Jacobs careening with his wah and heavy vibrato over the steady, menacing bassline.

There was also some mystery concerning the album…namely, where to find it.  Holy Grove’s Bandcamp page had it for awhile as a name-your-price download, then it disappeared. Now it’s back up at youtube.

 

A Killer Heavy Psychedelic Triplebill in Greenpoint on the 23rd

Melodic metal band The Well‘s impressingly eclectic debut album Death and Consolation is streaming at Bandcamp. Much as they send a slow, smoky salute to the gods of doom, Black Sabbath, they alsso bring to mind bands as diverse as the Stooges and Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats. The Austin power trio keep their songs tight and their solos to to a finely sharpened point. They’re playing St. Vitus on Oct 23 at around 10 PM. Stoogoid stoner boogie band Sun Voyager open the night at 8, followed by the aptly named Heavy Temple; cover is $10

The album’s opening track, Sabbah begins with a sitar-like drone and then hits a stomping drive and a doomy, catchy chromatic theme. There’s a little Ozzy in the doubletracked vocals of frontman/guitarist Ian Graham and bassist Lisa Alley, and some unhinged Ron Asheton proto-punk in the tantalizingly short guitar solos.

The tersely twisting riffage of Raven also brings to mind Raw Power-era Stooges. Death Song kicks off with a reverb-drenched, spacy intro and the hits a ponderous, vintage Sabbath sway. The band build Cup of Peace around a simple, macabre fuzztone riff, while Eyes of a God has an enigmatic, futuristic intro and more than a hint of Hendrix.

They go back to evil chromatics and swirly film score sonics for Act 1, picking up with drummer Jason Sullivan’s stoner boogie bounce at the end. “Lead me toward an endless high,” Graham sings over the fuzz bass and spare, gloomy blend of guitar and piano as Freedom Above gets underway. “Please don’t take my high away.”

This Is How has a gritty,clenched-teeth tension; the album’s final cut, Endless Night, is the most trad, 70s style track here. Happy early Halloween, everybody.

A Relentless Gothic Postrock/Metal Hybrid from Alltar

Portland, Oregon’s Alltar bridge the gap between gloomy, dystopic Mogwai postrock and doom metal. Their new album Hallowed is streaming at Bandcamp. No shredding, no stoner blues, no boogie, just slow-baked, grimly swaying grey-sky vistas punctuated by the occasional upward drive. Interestingly, 80s gothic rock is a big influence along with the requisite Sabbath references.

The opening track, Horology starts out as a watery, spare chromatic bass-driven vamp and then explodes with a firestorm from guitarists Tim Burke and Colin Hill. The vocals are buried in the mix: if the dark early 80s Boston bands like Mission of Burma played metal, they would have sounded like this. Likewise, if the Cure were a metal band, they would have built War Altar as this band does here, taking a morose, drippy stalactite theme, finally making snarling doom metal out of it with a long series of distorted 6/8 guitar riffs and disembodied vocals. There’s also a sarcastic cynicism to the lyrics.

The most epic track here is Induction, opening with a clanging, bell-like, slowly syncopated art-rock sway. “Society has lost its connection to humanity, and I can’t understand why,” keyboardist/frontman Juan Carlos Caceres ponders. “If chosen, what would you say?” Drummer Nate Wright’s careful accents foreshadow grinding doom metal crush: again, It’s rare that you hear a guy behind the kit who’s as dynamic as he is here.

Hailstorm tremolo-picking and a slow, evil chromatic riff open Spoils before the relentless crush and lo-res distortion kick in, with a final rise from super-slow, to just plain slow and ceaselessly grim. The band seem to care more about vocals than most metal acts: the apocalypse seems awfully close. Four solid tracks to smoke up to and contemplate the end.