Praise for Carlton Melton‘s Country Ways from San Francisco’s aQuarius Records: There’s no shortage of psychedelic space rock in SF these days: recent Record Of The Weekers Lumerians, the Spyrals, Wooden Shjips, Sleepy Sun, and these guys, Carlton Melton, not a person, but a quartet, who conjure up epic stretches of spaced out psychedelia. And who, unlike many of their contemporaries, seem to be less concerned with the pulse, and the rhythm. And the groove, as they are with the SOUND, and the VIBE, weaving lush, expansive sprawls of effects drenched psychedelic ambience, drifting more often than driving, huge clouds of swirling wah guitars, and minimal spare drumming, which seems to exist more as a pulse, than a beat proper. Everything murky and muddy and washed out, at once lo-fi, but impossibly dense and heavy, the band seeming to drift weightless though swirling starlit sonic skies. Their sound loose and free and abstract and ephemeral.
The whole first side here is a single track, the title track, and it’s a fantastically entrancing space drone epic. A sound the drifts and buzzes and flutters and swirls, the sound emerging in swells, building into squalls of warm whirling chaos only to slip back into something more druggy and dreamy and meditative. It’s not until the final couple minutes that the song finally explodes, and even then it doesn’t really get heavier. The rhythm doesn’t get any more intense, instead, it just sounds like the whole band crank it up a notch. The swirling clouds of effects and guitars suddenly become more volatile, and more chaotic. The melodies gradually swallowed up by slashes of distorted guitar crunch and crumbling walls of distortion, the sound gets more dense, and more thick, and the whole time the main groove, now buried beneath the roiling surface, continues on unwavering. The only thing keeping the track from drifting into the heavens and toward the heart of the sun.
The flipside is more of the glorious same, barring a brief bit of solo guitar, an interlude that is bookended by two more heaving walls of krautpsych swirl. The band unfurling droned out minimal hypnorock mini epics, that howl and thrum, buzz and shimmer, songs that obviously could have been stretched way out and turned this into a double lp.
As always, fantastic stuff. Fans of the SF psych / space / drone / kraut rock contingent that aren’t already into CM, get with it! And obviously, anyone into White Hills, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Cave, The Heads, Heavy Winged, Bardo Pond, White Noise Sound, Spacemen 3 and the like, these guys will definitely hit the spot.
At 40 years old, Aquarius is the oldest independent record store in San Francisco. We try to only carry music we love, and we’re always searching for more new, cool, weird and wonderful music. All of which we then share with you, our loyal customers.
Tags: Album of the day, Aquarius Records, Carlton Melton, Country Ways, psychedelica
This entry was posted on Monday, March 14th, 2011 at 5:10 am and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day . 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.
woooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww.terrible sound.i love it.(la o adica ma urc si pe pereti). you’re dead mother fucker!