Reviews

Record #773: Kyuss – Welcome to Sky Valley (1994)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In the late 1980s, a young group of musicians in Palm Desert, California cut their teeth playing “generator parties.” Small crowds would gather in the desert with gasoline generators and copious amounts of beer and cannabis. And into these sparse, potsmoke filled wastelands, stonerrock pioneers Kyuss would play directly to the crowds, free of the politics of club owners and venue promoters.

Welcome to Sky Valley was recorded a long way from those desert fetes. It was released on a major label, for crying out loud. But three free-flowing, organic spirit of those early performances is imprinted directly into this album’s DNA.

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Record #772: Kowloon Walled City – Grievances (2015)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

There is a misconception I see sometimes that the better a song is, the more difficult it is to play. After all, anybody can write a simple song, but it takes someone with real talent to write something complicated. It takes real talent to play an intricate solo. It takes real talent to write a song with lots of different chords and multiple time changes.

However, there are numerous examples across the world of recorded music that disprove that theory. Bands like The Ramones or The Jesus and Mary Chain.

Add to that list Kowloon Walled City, a Oakland CA outfit that creates huge monoliths of sludge metal without much complication. While other bands might be tempted to speed these songs up or fill them with gratuitous guitar solos.

Kowloon Walled City resists these urges, trusting the strength of the crawling riffs and passionate songwriting to make Grievances a chilling statement—and rightly so.

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Record #771: Kellen – Lowercase God (2018)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

One of the things about having friends that run record labels is that sometimes, you’ll get curated bonuses thrown in with your orders. This is especially true of my friend Rob who runs Friend Club Records, who always includes trading cards of hockey players and handwritten notes with the cassettes I buy from him.

But sometimes, he’ll toss a record my way, which is how I was introduced to Kellen and their brilliant genre-bending EP Lowercase God.

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Record #770: Boston – Boston (1976)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

After decades of these songs being staples of classic rock stations and karaoke bars, it’s tempting to lump Boston in with the throngs of arena-ready, prog noodling bands often labelled (derisively) “Dad Rock.”

And yeah: your dad probably loves this album. But to dismiss it as dad rock is to miss the truth…

This is one of the greatest DIY records ever made.

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Record #769: Fiddlehead – Between the Richness (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

In 2018, members of hardcore legends Have Heart and post-hardcore heroes Basement released Springtime and Blind, a stunningly tight and catchy piece of post hardcore that was as catchy as it was urgent. Despite its clear hardcore roots, there was a remarkable pop sensibility that injected each song with throat-shredding singalong passages, all wrapped up in a 25-minute package.

At the time, it seemed like a lightning-in-a-bottle record. The kind of record that was singularly excellent, even if you couldn’t quite describe why. And usually, these sorts of records prove incredibly difficult to follow up. After all, capturing lightning once is almost impossible. But twice?

Apparently it’s not that hard for Fiddlehead.

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Record #768: Elder – Lore (2015)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’ve been a huge fan of Massachusetts psych-metal outfit Elder from the moment I heard the opening chords of 2017’s Reflections of a Floating World. They combined elements of Black Sabbath’s lurching doom, Kyuss’ sprawling stoner rock, and Rush’s meandering prog in a brilliant package and wrapped it all in a coat of Can’s Krautrock psychedelia. I was powerless to resist it.

Since then, I’ve been searching for copies of their back catalog, and outside of a few high priced copies in Europe, the pickings were slim. But lucky for me, in early 2020, Elder repressed their entire back catalog with the intention of selling them on a world tour. Unlucky for them, that tour was canceled when the pandemic shut the world down. In either case, I have finally acquired their third full length, Lore, which found the band stretching more fully into prog and psychedelic elements. And to incredible success, I might add.

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Record #767: BIG|BRAVE – Vital (2021)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald / 1 Comment

For someone who is as heavily into glacial, sludgy, female-fronted metal as I am, it might come as a shock to hear that I never heard about Big Brave until a couple months ago when I found myself with an advanced copy of their newest album to review. But within seconds of the opening track “Abating the Incarnation of Matter,” I was already on their site ordering this record. Immediately after I finished the review, I tracked down a copy of their earlier album A Gaze Among Them.

All that to say. This record is great.

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Record #766: Kate Bush – Hounds of Love (1985)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The art world is filled with archetypes. Take for example how every precocious pop starlet from Britney to Lady Gaga to Ariana Grande has garnered comparisons to Madonna.

On the other hand, it’s almost impossible to overhear any discussion about quirky art pop femme fatales (see: Bjork, St. Vincent, Regina Spektor) without the name Kate Bush being dropped somewhere.

But for all my love of the inventive artists often compared to her, I hadn’t actually spent any time with her work until a few months ago when I decided to spring for (what I understand to be) her seminal record, Hounds of Love. That leap of faith was rewarded tenfold.

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Record #765: In This Style – Craft (2019)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

I’m a devout believer in the importance of local music. Much of my life has been guided by the community I’ve gained from the local and regional music scene, and I’ve invested much in my life to its success. Perhaps the biggest reason I moved back to South Bend from Chicago was to help build the local scene here.

In that regard, one of the constant misconceptions I deal with is the idea that local music is necessarily of a lesser quality than “real” music. And while it’s true that there’s no shortage of lackluster bar bands hacking their way through Eagles covers bringing down the average, some of the most beautiful music I’ve experienced has come from the craftsmanship of people in my own community.

Take for instance In This Style, a seven-piece prog rock outfit that delivers the kind of hypnotic, mind-melting, sonic alchemy you’d expect to be played in stadiums or huge open air festivals, not small venues and dive bars.

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Record #764: Dustin Kensrue – Carry the Fire (2015)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

The one thing that truly set Thrice apart from the throngs of other early-to-mid -00s post-hardcore bands was the ability of lead singer Dustin Kensrue to craft great choruses. Even at their moshiest, there was a pop sensibility that displayed a deep appreciation for blues, folk, and classic R&B that demanded singalong.

Even as they’ve expanded their sonic palette to incorporate elements of post rock, sludge metal, and electronica, his love of roots music has remained central. Beggars may be the only album in history to cite both Isis and Billie Holiday as influences.

With this in mind, longtime Thrice fans should find no surprises in his 2015 solo record Carry the Fire, a relatively subdued pop record that finds him embracing these elements without the need for hardcore catharsis.

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