Their last album, Eat The Low Dogs, was hailed as a masterpiece, and Run Thick In The Night doesn’t depart drastically on the sound they’ve already established. It begins with the moody, brooding 13 minute track ‘In The Night’, with its heavily textured, wall of sound “outlaw country gone shoegaze” guitars and spacey keyboard sweeps, and morphs quickly into the Hawkwind inspired rager ‘Wolf On Anareta.’

‘Fire Is Sleeping’ is a tender ballad, really upping the ante on the Southern and Skynyrd influences without resorting to the usual cliches, and adds some weepy violin and mournful slide guitar to the mix. The next few songs continue in this style, country-tinged, acid drenched, and melancholy, until the bass and drum driven track ‘The Quena’ breaks the spell and gives a much needed change of pace.

Continue reading: StonerRock.com – U.S. Christmas – Run Thick In The Night.

While Cave have become masterful at their ability to create rhythmic and propulsive kraut like jams, with Bitchin Bajas, Cooper is taking his aim at the more spaced out side of kosmische bliss. Evoking the kraut-drone / kraut-age of Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Deutsche Wertarbeit, Cluster as well as Terry Riley’s A Rainbow In Curved Air, this is such a perfect early morning sunrise salute of a record.

Tones / Zones also reaches the level to which modern day cosmic travelers like Arp, White Rainbow, Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never have ascended. The sounds here get locked in the most celestial grooves and you find yourself floating into the sky losing any sense of gravity or the mundane reality of everyday life. This is perfect music for dreaming, drifting and softly coming down. Majestic and so satisfying.

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.

I sadly cannot get into most of the current retro sounding bands as I seem to just need that original feel that only comes from the 30 year old albums, but Elektrohash has fooled me a few times with acts like: Colour Haze, Kings of Frog Island, and now Hypnos 69, they sound so fucking genuine 70’s psyche / prog rock that I can’t help but fall under the spell they cast upon me. The album, as are some of the tracks, can be moody so don’t expect everything morose or spacey as they may begin. Maybe the reason this works for me is that just mentioned but also the jazzy rhythms used throughout because I think of organs and jazzy improvs with trippy lyrics when I think prog and that’s what I get here overall.

Legacy kicks off with a great catchy and still epic track, ‘Requiem (For a Dying Creed)’, that is woven from the threads of folk-like almost acoustic passages complete with a flute, a heavier psychedelic jam free-for-all, and the absolutely essential saxophone solo right smack in the middle of the psyche jam. This track is unmistakably prog, not neo-psyche or some stoner variety of a band and really does set the tone for the album as whole. Starting out an album with a 17 minute track isn’t usually something I’d advise as it makes better for a closer or middle bridging track given most peoples short attention spans, but Hypnos 69 pulls it off and it really DOES pull you in to the album nicely.

Continue reading: HellrideMusic.com – Hypnos 69 – Legacy.

It’s about time his inexplicably obscure Cold Fact got the deluxe reissue treatment it deserves. Seriously, after listening to this for the first time, you’ll feel like you just heard a bona fide ’60s classic, and be amazed you had never heard these songs before. They ought to be all over “oldies” rock radio. It’s ridiculous like that. Songs like ‘Sugar Man’ and ‘I Wonder’ seem like they should be fixtures of the baby boomer memory lane hit parade. It’s so very of its era, ‘This Is Not A Song, It’s An Outburst: Or, The Establishment Blues’ is certainly a sixties song title, isn’t it?

Likewise ‘Rich Folks Hoax’, ‘Hate Street Dialogue’, and ‘Crucify Your Mind’… But, maybe he was just a little too freaky and right on, and (crucially) never got the right sort of record label support to become well known to the Woodstock Nation, though this album had some rather random, surprising success so far off in the Southern Hemisphere, in South Africa and Australia and New Zealand, which Rodriguez himself was unaware of for many years!

If left to his own devices, perhaps Rodriguez would have come off sounding a bit too much like Dylan. But Cold Fact was a “Theo-Coff” production, from the badass Motor City team of Mike Theodore and funk guitarist Dennis Coffey, and they helped accentuate the more underground and urban aspects of Rodriguez’s sound. With his hip, Dylanesque poetry set amidst lush orchestration and gritty grooves, Rodriguez’s Cold Fact is a super catchy, tripped out slice of street-level, soulful psychedelia, full of drug references and radical political critique. We alluded to “fuzz” above, but on the track ‘Only Good For Conversation’ we mean FUZZ. That track’s a stone(d) cold classic when it comes to heavy duty fuzz guitar crunch.

This reish comes in a nice digipack, with cover embossing and a big ol’ cd booklet stuffed with text (liner notes, lyrics) and photos. One of the several cd booklet essays explains in part Rodriguez’s unexpected appeal in South Africa – apparently, in that repressive society, it was due to the edgy, uncensored nature of his lyrics. ‘I Wonder’, for instance, with its lines about “I wonder how many times you had sex / And I wonder do you know who’ll be next” was considered so risque that if you were a teenager and wanted to be cool, you HAD to have this record.

Apparently, many folks in South Africa thought of Rodriguez as being a star up there with the Beatles, and when they didn’t hear more from him, all sorts of wild rumors spread that he’d died, been accidentally electrocuted, OD’d, or even committed suicide on stage! When, in fact, he simply had no idea how “big” he was in South Africa, and his recording career had stalled out elsewhere after his sophomore album, 1971′s Coming From Reality (also soon to be reissued). Turns out he’s still alive and well, today, and has actually gone to South African to pay arena (?!) shows in recent years.

In fact, when we’ve had album in the store before, it was only available on cd as an expensive import – from South Africa! So we’re, again, super stoked that Light In The Attic put the effort in to do this long overdue, definitive domestic reissue.

*actually, his first name was Sixto, but he usually just went by Rodriguez.

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.

After the success of their last raved about album Nothing to Say, the band returned to their studio in Peru to record this more ambitious and accomplished sounding follow-up.

The album recalls all the great psychedelic bands from the past forty years, from the 70’s bands like Ash Ra Tempel, Amon Düül II and Hawkwind; through to 80’s bands like Monster Magnet (particularly TAB era) and Loop and today’s contemporary cosmic warlords like Eternal Tapestry, White Hills and Magic Lantern.

Mecanica Celeste is a conceptually unique take on psychedelia, conceived by manipulating traditional religious songs, text ideology and poetry with heavy fuzz guitars, swirling drones, spaced out wah solos, motorik rhythms and delayed vocals, to create a head melting experience of an album which climaxes with the proto metal riffs of track Sendero, giving the band a fresh sounding approach to the well trod grounds of space rock: Serpentina Satelite tried to get to heaven but ended up in space!

As Elektrohasch Schallplatten releases their third album, Tri, it’s becoming clear just how much they embody the mission of the label. Not only are they all about the music, but like the best of Elektrohasch’s acts (Colour Haze, Hypnos 69), they manage to subdue even at their most active – I’ll stop short of saying aggressive, because there really isn’t anything aggressive about what they do – moments. What was true on their My Sleeping Karma debut and on Satya remains true on Tri: My Sleeping Karma play hypnotic riff rock with psychedelic undertones, and as each album turns to the next, they’re becoming among the best at what they do.

With Satya, the theme (brought out in the song titles and artwork) was Tibetan Buddhism, and while they still have a “Free Tibet” logo stamped on the inside of the Tri digipak, the band seems to have moved on to Hinduism, as each of the tracks on Tri is named for a Hindu god, starting with ‘Brahama’, who created human beings, to ‘Sarasvati’, a goddess in both Hinduism and Buddhism, who protects them.

In between, the band makes note of several other gods, ‘Vishnu’ and ‘Shiva’ among them, while also touching on Hindu/Buddhist concepts of inaction in ‘Tamas’ and purity ‘Sattva’. Where they lie spiritually I honestly couldn’t say, but some of the songs have the feel of chants, as though without actually using words, they’re saying “Hare Brahama” through music, to get the god’s attention and favor. At least that’s how I like to think about it. You may have your own interpretation.

Continue reading: My Sleeping Karma Come Awake with Tri | The Obelisk.
(Special Thanks to JJ Koczan for the very kind permission)

Cyclopean Records is proud to introduce Sungod, an onslaught of drifting riffs, pounding drums, and oscillations from Austin, TX. First Matter represents Sungod’s first recorded excursions into the vastness of the inner space. The sonic forms move from driving 70′s psychedelica to desolate western soundscapes and create a cerebral amalgam of heavy riffs, hypnotic drones, and pulsing rhythms.

Captured to analog tape, the nature of the sound is organic, warm and intimate. This quality of the recording, combined with the exploratory nature of the music, make the two-piece’s cosmic collection of improvisations and compositions an ideal soundtrack for the altered mind. First Matter will see a limited vinyl release with an elaborately decorated gatefold sleeve that informs and accentuates the mystical nature of the sonic rituals. Far-reaching and unrelenting, prepare for the Sungod and perish in his light.

In other related news, Sungod’s  Nur der Wahnsinnige is Sich Absolut Sicher, recorded live in 2009 to 4-track cassette with no overdubs, is also available for streaming:

Of course, I got mine in the end, as Tee Pee now releases the follow-up from these Toronto argonauts, Lights from Paradise. Sure enough, a promo of the record came in the mail, and I put it on, and now I want both albums. So yeah, thanks a lot.

Lights from Paradise is eight tracks of sprawling psychedelia from the Canadian four-piece, ranging from the ritualistic stillness of opener ‘The Greatest Hits by God’, which seems to capitalize on what Om might sound like with two guitars, to the semi-raucousness of ‘Set Out Alone’ or the Dead Meadow freakout of ‘In the Place of a Storm.’  Of the sundry personality traits the band shows on the album, I prefer the moody, subdued side that comes out on the first track or ‘Psychic Seasons’, which boasts one of Lights from Paradise’s few excursions into acoustics and also features some strings for a classy touch.

Of course, there’s something to be said for the extended Beatles-style solo in closer ‘Sessions of Light’ as well, which shows Quest for Fire as a band with more than just a reverb pedal and propensity for jamming, complex as its melody structure and progression are. Take your pick, really.

Continue reading:  Quest for Fire See the Lights | The Obelisk.
(Thanks to JJ Koczan for the very kind permission)

Pure Moods is so much more than just a compilation series: it’s like some kind of a creepy axis that sneaks up when Pandora’s left on too long without feedback, that bites the asses of even the artiest. It makes us think of automated nurture, overaged greatness, our parents by Freudian extension. I love me some Enya and Dream Academy on proper occasion, but it’s understandable that that complicit warmth carries a certain dread for most people.

Huzzah to Cave for feeding off that dread. Ostensibly. But what we’ve basically got on this EP is a flatlined version of what came before it — 2009’s still-writhing Psychic Psummer — with a smattering of tricks that can simply no longer fight the groove. And it’s a mightily sick groove, folks, but if you thought they were going to up the ante with a cheeky title like Pure Moods, keep listeners on their toes or whatnot, you’ll be surprised to find that Cave are progressing almost exactly as you’d expect them to.

Continue reading: Cave – Pure Moods [EP] | Music Review | Tiny Mix Tapes.

Hard formats are due in September. Spacey but not meandering, gently melodic but with cojones, La Otracina pummel on burly tracks like Raze The Sky available for download HERE, courtesy of BrooklynVegan.

Continue reading: Brooklyn Vegan- new La Otracina LP (MP3) & upcoming shows (dates).