Clavius Productions presents a very special evening with two up-and-coming California bands in the vein of Comets On Fire and Mudhoney. Vincent Black Shadow just got "album of the month" on Julian Cope's website Head Heritage. And local noise merchants Facemat will tear it up, with a special guest from Kohoutek on percussion. A Sunday night not to be missed:
Sunday, June 11
Warehouse Next Door
1017 7th St NW WDC
$8, all ages
doors at 8:30, show at 9:15
Residual Echoes (Holy Mountain, heavy garage psych from Santa Cruz CA)
Mammatus (Holy Mountain, stoner psych from Santa Cruz CA)
Facemat (DC improv noise/psych)
Vincent Black Shadow (Baltimore garage psych)
Residual Echoes http://www.holymountain.com/echoes.htm The Residual Echoes were formed by Adam Payne after he moved to Santa Cruz and met the encouraging forces of Ethan Miller (Comets on Fire) and Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance). They have blossomed into one of that city's finest groups. Their sound is a vibrant collage of everything that has ever happened in music, all deftly manipulated and manicured by Mr. Payne into some of the most farfreaking-out jams ever heard.
Santa Cruz, California -- known for abandoned military bases where rumors persist of strange mind control experiments a la Montauk -- is an area that was at one time the "serial killer capitol of the world." I know, I missed that sign, too. Anyway, you've got these mountains full of getting-away-from-the-city-type cults and communes rife with pure magical evil and ritual sacrifices. Whoa, Maury Terry; hold on there, Preston Nichols -- what's this got do with a high-energy psychedelic rock band? Have you heard about these experimental drugs that afflict enemy soldiers with intense halitosis, or cause their hair to fall out, or the one that makes everyone super-horny? This album is like a really small dose of that kind of drug. Go to one of their shows. The band gets crazy and the people who see them get even crazier.
Phoenecian Flu And Ancient Ocean is another seething mish-mash of psychedelia, krautrock and free-noise -- the perfect follow-up to last year's highly regarded self-titled debut LP. Partially self-recorded and partially recorded in the studio,
Phoenecian Flu and Anciet Ocean is full of absolutely staggering material. The endless riff-sanity of "Death Comes for the Archbishop" is followed by billowing smoke, then a fuzzy-wuzzy pop number that finally shoots itself when the smell of smoke turns out to be an amp that was on far too loud for far too long. That piece of reverbed noise insanity might've been all were it not for the depraved psychedelic dub and Monoshock tribute that follows. Odes to the acoustic guitar and former gods of the six-string close the album. What does it sound like? Everything and nothing, baby.
Mammatus http://www.mammatus.org/ Whoa, heavy!! This is a whole-body-vibrating, brain-melting, serious amplifier-worship ceremony! The first time I (Allan) saw these guys, last year sometime at the Hemlock here in San Francisco, I was blown away...I'd been told they were a heavy "stoner rock" outfit from Santa Cruz and worth checking out, but I didn't realize they were gonna be quite so AMAZING. Hairy backwoods hippy dudes, the drummer wearing what looked to be a home-made Whysp t-shirt, guitars turning the air to cottage cheese a la Blue Cheer while creating a trance-zone worthy of Finland's Circle!! So good that I immediately bought the live cd-r they were selling...we were gonna try to get some for the store, in fact, but then we found out that local label Holy Mountain run by our pal JW was on the case already and would be issuing Mammatus's debut studio full-length CD Stateside (with Rocket Recordings, home to the most recent Ufomammut, putting it out in Europe).
So yeah, heavy stoner rock this is, but waaay psychedelic and Hawkwindy, kinda like what maybe you thought Circle side-project Pharaoh Overlord was gonna (and sometimes does) sound like. Loud, massive and mesmerizing, swirling sludge psych! Their songs, often of epic length, are ever chugging skyward, dripping molten goo, full of feedback and fx. Their energetic riffage and warm drones are adorned by drifting vox (not unlike Dead Meadow, with whom they share certain proclivities) and fantastic, metallic, progtastic imagery. Take note of titles like "Dragon Of The Deep" (parts one and two!) and the Roger Dean-esque cover art by Arik "Moonhawk" Roper.
Further musical comparisions aren't hard to come up with -- Mammatus belong in the company of such bastions of cosmic heaviness as Sleep, Boris, YOB, Ufomammut, Earthless, old Monster Magnet, Acid Mothers Temple (at AMT's heaviest, like on
Starless & Bible Black Sabbath), Tarantula Hawk, and even Amon Duul (especially on the druggy, krautrocky jam "The Outer Rim"). And of course they're now labelmates with OM, which also makes perfect sense. If you love many, or even just any, of those bands and the sounds they make, this comes highly recommended. (Aquarius Records)
Vincent Black Shadow http://www.heartbreakbeatrecords.com/ "...Moreover, with regard to the sound made by Vincent Black Shadow, their unrighteous Israeli Wall of Sound issuing forth behind this Great Stone Eater is an ultra confident stop-start micro-Detroit machine-shop of the highest order, nay the newest order! Mix one part of Blue Cheer??s ??Out Of Focus?? with two parts early Pa Ubu (??Non Alignment Pact?? via ??Cloud 149??), then filter all through Beefheart??s ??Moonlight On Vermont??. Drain and serve on a bed of Terry Knight production values, and you got this debut LP by Vincent Black Shadow...
VINCENT BLACK SHADOW is a monumental debut, and damn me if it ain??t righteous the way they bring in the whole ship and cargo at just over thirty minutes. Place yourselves in central Greece, brothers??n??sisters, for that is where our tale ??The Legend of Side A?? begins with ??Child Of Orion??. High on the broken battlements of Orchemenos sits the heroic bearded figure of Bobcat Rufus Platt, each drum having been hefted, dragged, threatened and cajoled up to the citadel from the Boeotian Plain below. Bobcat commences a massive soul stomp in the Don Brewer/Scott Krauss manner, and wakes from its slumber the whole of Boeotia, home of Orion. And it??s up here high upon the citadels of Orchomenos, ancient capital of Boeotia, that we first glimpse Brother Black Savage searching frantically at the foot of the dusty dry-stone walling for the eyes of his blinded father Orion. Insurgents armed with solid-body-six-strings join Bobcat high on the citadel and proceed to lambaste the scenery with the kind of braying Glitter Band-plays-kazoo marching band guitar snarl that was at its height of popularity in the early post-Christian late 1960s, but which continued to inform the rock genre until the middle of the 22nd century, via the accidental re-discovery in 2078 of the DEVOTION LP, an unlikely 1970 hybrid proto-metal doom epic from the pre-Mahavishnu??d mind of John McLaughlin during his forgotten Black Sabbath-informed period on Douglas Records. That??s Outer Dave Litz standing in the doorway, his dreadlocked longhair streaked with dry egg and cereal, for he is the Guitar Muncher and often makes his most beautiful sounds when he??s eating the strings. Parallel with Outer is his shorthaired be-shaded counterpart Dan Van Owen. When he??s strangling hoary clichés out of his axe, some call him just Dan Owen, but it??s the ??van?? of vanguard that is the key to this man. And when Dan kicks his middle name into gear, The Van accelerates to new heights. Over this fully-loaded twin fuzz Mekong Delta soul stomp, Adam Black Savage fesses up to being the grandson of Poseidon and the son of that great Boeotian hunter who took so much shit from Apollo and Dionysus. It??s a barbarian classic, if you??ll ??scuse the oxymoron. The ducking and diving triple riffing of ??Real Wood?? kicks in next, a raging Tiger B. Smith dumb punkathon, with stop-start rhythms somewhat akin to ??I Want, Need, Love You?? by the legendary Australian band The Black Diamonds, but played harder as though by ABSOLUTELY FREE-period Mothers. That bass ??- what the fuck? A single torn 8" speaker cone mike??d up by someone??s home tape recorder??s microphone. Is the Savage yelling ??It??s hard work?? or ??Sod work!?? Both ways is fine by me, as bottleneck guitars and blistered bluesy fuzz bass underpins the ??American Woman??-styled harmony twin lead. The Savage screams over and over: ??Tell me I??m a sucker, tell me I??m a sucker...?? over and over and fucking over into the ending. Then, with barely a moment??s rest: ??Heat rays is what we??ve got going on?? and the small beginning of ??Blow It Up In The Sunshine?? suddenly blows up and opens out into a flattened and shimmering motorik kraut (small ??k??) road-trip in an open-topped pre-WW2 Mercedes (black with massive fenders) in the style of Can??s ??Mother Sky?? or The Stooges?? ??Loose??; as the Savage wishes he was a lightning bug because he??s out of control, he??s out of control, he??s out of control. Then, as the urging siren guitars feedback on and into each other in pure coagulating sonic alchemy, the sky turns red and the Savage??s lupine howl announces a sunset, as the feedback guitars, panned now hard right and left, decorate the horizon with the good jismick juice. Side One concludes with ??Colours & Feelings??, a kind of one-minute instrumental ??Boris The Spider?? bass-player take on the GET CARTER-theme that swans in, does a once around the block, then sods off quick. I want more...??Ain??t No Law?? kicks off Side B like Joy Division playing a demented Hawkwind song (DOREMI-period), with FX of the Thirteen Floor Elevators persuasion, as the catchy bastard ??Ain??t no law, ain??t no law?? chorus blasts a seemingly endless repeat, that is until they slow it all down to half-speed (this is becoming an excellent habit) and THEN some (Joey Smith-stylee), as the scything schrieking feedbacking guitars howl and stratospherize the nacht into a towering ack-ack anti-aircraft gun search for enemy planes flying too high to be detected up at 50,000 feet. Then we??re off to the pure LOVE IT TO DEATH of ??Raoul??, a kind of Alice-meets-side-two-of-the-red-Grand Funk second LP. Darker than usual is the ??Legend of Sex?? with its lead bass and Terminal Lovers/Downside Special rock melody over uncanny and strange chords, eventually dropping down into another classic repeated chorus: ??Does anyone know about the body??? Some places this band go allow the bass insurgency to climb right up there freaking out alongside the guitars, leaving excellent room for a fuggy haze of chordless free-rock to hang about the air conditioning system, facilitating the entrance of the final song ??Drunk In Space?? to kick in like early Alice does with the free-rock of ??Return Of The Spiders??. ??I know no God?? bawls the Savage over a riff somewhat akin to The Stooges playing a pounding and far more remedial version of the ??School??s Out?? riff. The Savage would only need to sing ??let me in?? at this point for the Alice-Iggy Cycle to be completed, but the twin 15 minutes of this Vincent Black Shadow is already over, Brothers??n??Sisters. However, I??ll tell you this, gentlemen of the Shadow, you??ve achieved one excellent and real motherfucker of a debut. It??s hard as nails, catchy, obsessive, smart and dumber than almost everything out there. This stuff will be on the compulsory listening list in a few years?? time, of that I??m sure. You catchy motherfuckers deserve to go far." (Julian Cope, Head Heritage)
