Right, you know that moment in sword and sorcery films where the hero climbs to the top of a peak to see what’s going on and his jaw drops because in the valley below is an orc army thousands and thousands strong? Well, this album would make a great soundtrack for one of those moments.
Two spiralling tracks of unashamed freak out make up Blown Out‘s Drifting Way Out Between Suns that will lead you towards worlds where ancient civilizations once existed and where the black lotus leads your mind into a drug-fuelled fug.
Side one’s colossal title track already hints at its cosmic expanse from the opening few seconds and from its title. This is trip-out music, a mulch of Acid Mothers Temple and early Hawkwind mixed into a blissed-out, space-trucking guide through galactic other worlds. Bass and drums churn restlessly while wild echo-soaked guitar plays a whirling dervish of notes that could have helped the collapse of Atlantis and signalled the rise of the sons of Aryas. At points the music spirals around, and the lead guitar gets very Hendrix-like at times as the band lays into a stoner groove and the weedian master rises from the smoke, his cloak of leaves billowing about him. Everything about the track is designed to take your mind to a different landscape and let it wander there for a time (twenty minutes to be exact). This is psychedelic music for the Rodney Matthews poster generation.Track (side) two is called “Quantum Shift On Plague Mothership” and is a twenty-one minute epic that starts with doom drone notes to which a tolling space echoed guitar sends warnings and portents to the dangers of travelling so far from mother Earth. Here you are so far out that Pluto is your nearest neighbour. This is the kind of track you would put on if you were running the old RPG game Traveller. It’s man drifting alone in the void in pristine spacecraft being separated from the rest of humanity and letting the endless nothing of the cosmos enter his mind. This is Jack Kirby’s 2001 adaptation, this is a multi-coloured trip to the monolith.
The music gains a certain amount of urgency as the track progresses, but all the while the lead guitar pushes the sound out further and further. The bass and drums here still hold some semblance of creating rhythms by which to reach the sky. You are beyond the solar wind and there’s only one route ahead of you. It owes allegiance to space rock, but is more like inner space rock. Put it on and leave planet Earth behind for a while.Whether you’re standing at the edge of that peak or the edge of the universe, Drifting Way Out Between Suns is for you.
-Gary Parsons-
