Earthless & Heavy Blanket
In a Dutch Haze
Outer Battery Records / Roadburn Records (2014)
Hour-long songs can be somewhat of a hard sell. For starters, there has to be an audience of listeners who are willing to carve out the time and sit and engage for sixty-plus minutes. Additionally and most crucially for instrumental projects, the sounds have to be there. Dopesmoker is an hour long, but it tells a story to go along with the riff. When it's all instruments, the riffs have to be at the front along with everything else. The elements have to work in concert with one another. Ideally, the finished piece will move seamlessly and open up paths that weren't there before. And it'll do so, while continuing to reveal other, intimate details on subsequent listens. "In a Dutch Haze" is a 58-minute-long recording of a collaboration between California stoner rock titans Earthless and J Mascis' psychedelic instrumental project, Heavy Blanket. According to the press release, the seeds of this joint effort were first laid out in 2009 at South by Southwest when Mascis struck up a "impromptu heavy psych jam" withEarthless, the San Diego-based trio comprised of guitarist Isaiah Mitchell, bassist Mike Eginton and drummer Mario Rubalcaba. Shortly after that one session, the involved parties would be … Read more
London Grammar
If You Wait
Columbia (2013)
Heartbreak in its truest form is one of life's most sobering and unyielding experiences. As the tedious old adage goes: … Read more
Electric Funeral
Total Funeral
Southern Lord (2014)
Total Funeral is the entire anthology-to-date of Electric Funeral, the one-man Swedish raw punk hobbyhorse manned by Jocke D-Takt. And … Read more
