Carlton Melton – Turn To Earth / Mandatory Melton

Agitated

California’s psych trio Carlton Melton have been distilling the best parts of the Hawkwind and Spacemen 3 for the best part of fifteen years and producing a sound that is inimitable. Expanding to a four-piece for their second album of 2023, but still pursuing an instrumental nirvana, Turn To Earth manages to sound like a natural progression and finds them pushing further into the fiery heart of the maelstrom.

The addition of Anthony Taibi on further synths and guitars manages to flesh the sound out a little more, not that it ever needed it; but somehow there is more body, extra textures that hint at worlds unseen on the edges of the swirling vortices that make up this batch of eleven tracks. The barely present intro like wind in the wires is an unexpected start, a touch of drums, a laborious hint at what might be to come; this half-volume gradual build turns its back on expectations and allows a new normal to be introduced, mind-numbing repetition but very much struck from their own mould.

Carlton Melton’s ability to move through moods and atmospheres over the course of the album is one of their real strengths and they can pour molten metal in your ears as with the excoriating “Cloudstorming” and then hurl guitar solos around like lightning bolts on the desperate “Vanquished”. You can feel the sweat flying and you can almost sense that Anthony’s presence has forced the others to re-evaluate. The results of this are a certain restlessness; the mellow, spacey drift of “Cosmicity” dithers and undulates, dilating and blooming in unforeseen ways, its cheesy keys and metronome beat the antithesis of the stuttering drums and wild rolls of the too short “Canned Head”.

The solidity of the drums across the album is an essential part of the appeal and adds to the hypnotic sensibility, but there are moments where they drop away and the ambient textures of  “Unlock The Land” slow things down to a soothing balm, a real dichotomy to the searing wah-wah monster into which it develops. The length of the pieces means that these differing atmospheres can appear through gradual intoxication, the metronomic motorik of “Roboflow” working its way sinuously into your brainpan, the flecks of guitar seen out of the corner of the eye, sharing space with synth touches that come on like a kaleidoscope.

Where guitar solos appear, there is some magical subtlety that renders them a natural part of the soundscape rather than an in your face show of selfishness and perhaps that is where the band’s real strength lies. They have an innate knowledge of just what each tracks needs and they never allow anything to outstay its welcome, even if we are heading towards the ten- or twelve-minute mark.

Towards the end of the album, wavelike synth flourishes give a pastoral echo to “Migration”, its delicious waft of pure phase an antidote to the claustrophobic drums and guitar surge of closer “Mutiny”. The basic yet senseless synth chatter brings to mind forgotten San Diego alchemists Physics and that sense of searching wonder is writ large here; but also an unwillingness to relent, pushing you further to the edge of reason. There might be no more than is needed, but every single drop is essential. For me, they could release an album every six months and I’d still be crying out for more.

As a bonus taster of their prior catalogue, this comes with a seven-track sampler CD, Mandatory Melton, that stretches to seventy-seven minutes and shows that Turn To Earth is no accident (it’s also available separately to download on their Bandcamp site).

Covering tracks that go back to 2010, we are overwhelmed by walls of guitar pushed along by Cramps-y drumbeats on 2013’s “Sarsen”, through the slower more stultifying treacle of “Space Treader” leading with subtle force to 2020’s harshly repetitive “Waylay”.

They play in three dimensions, the mix allowing certain elements through and pushing other to the back, depending on the requirements, and there is something seductive about the powerful embrace of “Adrift” that just pulls you further and further in. It is a long, lovely journey that takes in the incremental escalation of 2020’s “Smoke Drip Revisited” and drops you off in the sublime boat rock gentleness of 2010’s “When You’re In”, leaving you replete and just a little dazzled.

There is nearly two and a half hours of music to be consumed by here and you will not tire of it, just find yourself itching to delve into the back catalogue. Carlton Melton are a law unto themselves and for that we should be eternally grateful.

-Mr Olivetti-