stoner rock

Record #860: Elder – Dead Roots Stirring (2011)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Ever since I heard Reflections of a Floating World, I have nurtured a low-key obsession with the Bostonian/German group’s brand of progressive, psychedelic doom metal. After following them to Omens, I’ve started working backward, picking up their back catalog as I can.

Dead Roots Stirring, their sophomore record, might not have anyone hoisting it up as the group’s best album, but this might contain their purest devotion to bands like Black Sabbath, Kyuss, and Sleep without the Rush worship that their later work has been criticized for.

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Record #835: Cloakroom – Dissolution Wave (2022)

/ Nathaniel FitzGerald

Few bands have misrepresented themselves quite as severely as when Cloakroom described themselves as “stoner emo.” Certainly, there was no way that they could have predicted the wave of bands like Mom Jeans (and nothing like Cloakroom) that would be described as “weed emo,” but even without that confusion, there’s not much emo about what they’ve ever done. They have borne a resemblance to a certain 90s alternative band out of Champagne-Urbana, but they’ve always been much closer to HUM than Braid.

But the stoner bit…that’s never been up for debate. Extracurriculars aside, their guitars have always carried the same sort of heft as stoner metal bands like Kyuss and Sleep. But Dissolution Wave sounds the most like what I could imagine wafting out of my older brother’s bedroom carried with wisps of sage-masked pot smoke—if I had an older brother, anyway.

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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 #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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