Riot Season
This is full hippy in every good way. Hyperdrive hippy. Hippy in excelsis (not in Excel). Godz-driven, primal, ballistic-psychedelic, balls-to-the-wall, throttled/throttling. It’s the hippyish, proggy album that other people think they’ve made. There’s a massive meandering Alice Coltrane cover on here that sounds like it could be/should be terrible but works brilliantly. There’s devastating stoner stuff, a beautifully placed and ever-building soundworld which swirls and ebbs and pushes into you. There’s awkward movements in just the right places. This attempts to blow you away and achieves it in a way that most albums couldn’t even dream.
I’d never heard anything from
Earthling Society before and assumed this was going to be one of the those half-heard, half-liked albums that occasionally squeezed its way out of shuffle and caught me unawares in the middle of a walking binge, but this little fellah (this MONSTER) grabbed me at first listen. It has beautiful teeth. It’s hard to describe how this works so well: there’s elements of the heavy psych of
Gnod et al but feels tighter, less inclined to shambles; there’s elements of the better bits of
Pink Floyd (circa
Syd but without him, if you see what I mean); there’s the occasional whiff of something far out and jazzy (maybe something from Canterbury, via
Miles Davis) but it’s a little greater than those parts and I wouldn’t want it to be unfairly damned. It’s a LOT greater than the gunk and guff that normally associates itself with those kind of bands.
I guess THAT is what I really love about this album; it’s unafraid to go full hippy and yet keeps itself from all the usual trip/Trip ups and doesn’t stop reminding itself that psychedelia isn’t about the musicality
per se but the acceptance that
the music is essentially wrestling with other, potentially malevolent, forces, sprung direct from the dark heart of nature, of the wood, of the Wud. This will make you snuffle for ‘shrooms again, just to test it out. Maybe those prescription painkillers are not quite out of date after all. You’ll want to test this out, want to set it in opposition to your drugged self, want to try it up against the big boys. Find an LSD mule (okay, they are donkeys down here in the West) and some time (I have none to give you) and get things going. Let me know how you get on. I think I know, because listened to straight, in the warm light of a beautiful morning, I get the feeling that this music would wrestle with anything I could throw at it.
-Loki-
This is full hippy in every good way. Hyperdrive hippy. Hippy in excelsis (not in Excel). Godz-driven, primal, ballistic-psychedelic, balls-to-the-wall, throttled/throttling. It’s the hippyish, proggy album that other people think they’ve made. There’s a massive meandering Alice Coltrane cover on here that sounds like it could be/should be terrible but works brilliantly. There’s devastating stoner stuff, a beautifully placed and ever-building soundworld which swirls and ebbs and pushes into you. There’s awkward movements in just the right places. This attempts to blow you away and achieves it in a way that most albums couldn’t even dream.
