★Holy Mountain
Shoulda Zenith
The sky goes on forever in Barry Walker Jr.’s Shoulda Zenith, and it’s crackling with unexpected lightning. The Tennessee-bred, Portland-based pedal steel master subverts his instrument’s tradition for lachrymose, innocuous Rootzak™. Instead, he ventures to outward-bound strata more frequently traversed by Sonny Sharrock than Gram Parsons. “So often, the pedal steel is used as a textural flavor,” Walker says, “but it really can breathe fire itself.” Evidence for that claim abounds on Shoulda Zen…
Silver Tongued Sisyphus
Recorded in Brooklyn, Germany, and Memphis, Silver Tongued Sisyphus followed Cloudland Canyon's well-received Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004. The album's secular calls to prayer with humming, looping, and loping ambient passages are interspersed with bursting rhythmic energy and agitated guitar lines. Pulling influences from the foggy ether of generations past, the band stakes their claim to the shadows of the cult musical culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s German underground scene. Live sh…
Water's Edge
Future Shuttle is a Greenpoint, NYC-based duo (sometimes trio) comprised of Jessa Farkas and Camilla Padgitt-Coles. Prior to the group’s early 2009 conception, the pair studied electronic music at Oberlin College alongside their friends in Blondes and Teengirl Fantasy. Blondes member Sam Haar also produced the Water’s Edge EP, the group’s first officially released recording. In Future Shuttle’s beautifully dense brew of psychedelic reprogramming, Tangerine Dream meets the KLF at the UFO Club, an…
Lords of Falconry
A heady, sludge-rocking slab of prime Holy Mountain psychedelia from the fabulously monikered Lords Of Falconry, whose bird of prey-related band name may or may not be some kind of nod to Hawkwind - to whom these guys clearly owe a debt. With tracks like 'Doomsday Legislation' and the Acid Mothers Temple-esque 'Scottish Chords' you can expect thick, fudgey, mind-altering slabs of stoner riffage and fuzzy space-rock of the finest vintage, while some suitably wild soloing slices through the hammer…
Fin Eaves
We don’t write record reviews often these days thanks to the current paradigm of online music journalism. Considering our hyperactivie information age zeitgeist, why do you need some blowhard like myself describing a record to you when you can just pipe in the preview on Last.fm or whatever? With that said, it takes a certain type of album to convince me that I have some serious science to impart on others, and spirit warriors Cloudland Canyon’s latest, Fin Eaves, is just that type of work. Thi…