Album of the day: GNOD – The Crystal Pagoda

Lovingly stolen from San Fransisco’s Aquarius Records: You can often tell a lot about a band by the other bands they share splits with. And considering the fact that Gnod have done split time with both psychedelic space rockers White Hills, and space psych doomlords Bong, it’s pretty much a no brainer. And the fact that these guys can pretty much hold their own with both says it all.

And actually, the sound of Gnod does fall somewhere right between Bong and White Hills, beginning super murky and minimal, doomy and slow, the guitars abstract and space-y, fluttery flutes laced over whirring low end, the sound builds quickly to something seriously explosive, the drums pounding, lots of bagpipe like horns offering up more layers of drones, mumbled vox, distortion and noise and effects piling up until the rhythmic almost krautlike groove is buried beneath a heaving churning pile of constantly shifting and swirling sound. Pretty stellar for sure.

The second track here, another 20 minute space doom jam, is much less expansive, instead, it’s a solid chunk of hypno space rock, the drums and bass locked tight, weird vocals drift in and out, swirls of space-y FX swoop down from above, the surrounding ambience is ever changing, but the rhythm keeps the song grounded, a head nodding, drug addled non-stop mesmerizing groooooove, lysergic and psychedelic but pretty stripped down compared to that opening salvo. Good stuff for sure.

Anyone into the current crop of space rock explorers (like Expo 70, too, whose limited edition cassette/cd-r label put this out) will no doubt dig this BIG TIME.

Tags: album of the day, Aquarius Records, GNOD, psychedelica, Sonic Meditations, The Crystal Pagoda

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 7:47 am and is filed under Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.