CD Review: Monster Magnet – Milking the Stars: a reimagining of Last Patrol

CD Review: Monster Magnet – Milking the Stars: a reimagining of Last Patrol
Napalm Records
All Access Rating: A-

Monster Magnet - Milking the Stars:
a reimagining of Last Patrol 2014

Dave Wyndorf must have his reasons, although a remake of Monster Magnet's space-rock epic Last Patrol, one of the best albums of 2013, seems completely unnecessary.

Then again, Wyndorf is a maverick, artistically unpredictable and full of sonic mischief. He doesn't have to explain himself to anybody. He just does the unexpected and then wonders why everyone makes such a big damn fuss about it.

Wyndorf did that with Last Patrol, summoning forgotten tones and archaic, alien sonic transmissions from resurrected vintage gear to create brilliant, tripped-out aural carnivals of cinematic, swirling, retro psychedelia traveling through the deepest recesses of the universe to entertain misanthropic, burned-out cosmic cowboys with cynical hearts and sinful natures. This, however, is an even riskier venture.

On Milking the Stars: a reimagining of Last Patrol, released by Napalm Records, Wyndorf takes a stab at redesigning these playgrounds, and the alterations – most of them of the "tripping balls" variety – are more than cosmetic. Take "Let The Circus Burn" and "Mindless Ones '68" for example, the latter a more hallucinogenic reinterpretation of Last Patrol's title track that burrows deep into a very warped subconscious, as only Hawkwind could. "Mindless Ones '68," on the other hand, nicks hypnotic organ sounds out of the very hands of The Doors' Ray Manzarek and seems to swirl weightlessly into the harrowing oblivion of a black hole, losing its moorings in an LSD-induced nightmare.

While the production of Last Patrol was scrubbed pretty clean, Milking the Stars is a wild and woolly ride,  "No Paradise for Me" sounding more corrosive and cosmic than the original "Paradise" and the driving "End of Time" coming in hot at a lower elevation, hitting the runway with compromised brakes, Evangelical fervor and strong gusts of B-3 organ. And while most of Milking the Stars is spent looking for a empathetic guide to help it through what is surely a terrifying acid trip, it contains a howling version of "Hallelujah" – titled "Hellelujah (Fuzz and Swamp)" – that is a bluesier, more organic stomp raised from the Mississippi Delta. Clearly, some deal between Wyndorf and the devil has transpired.

Next time, maybe he can tackle an even bigger job, like repainting the Sistene Chapel.
– Peter Lindblad

CD Review: Monster Magnet – Last Patrol

Monster Magnet – Last Patrol

Napalm Records

All Access Rating: A-

Monster Magnet - Last Patrol 2013

Without Monster Magnet around to spark up their own full-throttle brand of “stoner metal” and go joy-riding through space to seek adventure and cruise for easy girls in the cosmos, the universe would be far less interesting.

Hedonistic space lords as magnificent as Dave Wyndorf apologize for nothing, and with the unforgiving Last Patrol, Monster Magnet’s latest magic carpet ride on Napalm Records, pimped out in retro amps, guitars and trippy effects in an attempt to summon the hallucinogenic demons of their early psychedelic-garage days, the word “sorry” cannot be found his rich vocabulary. Exuding warm and distinctive clarity, Last Patrol is produced with care, so that every part of this sonic space-rock jalopy sounds brand new and forceful, even with all the miles on her.

Housed in such a clean-running machine, this work of mind-blowing pulp fiction is full of noir-style, sci-fi tales of obsessive torment, revenge fantasies and sexual conquest pulled from the outer reaches of Wyndorf’s fevered imagination, and yet Last Patrol never gets lost in the stormy turbulence of its own making. Even amid the howling chaos of wah-wah guitars, crazed distortion and crashing drums that close the title track, Monster Magnet’s momentum-gathering riffs drive straight through it without ever being blown off course, just as they do in “End of Time,” another blazing garage-rock comet propelled forward with apocalyptic urgency and NASA-like precision into swirling madness.  

Painting vivid scenes with absurdist imagery and colorful language, Wyndorf talks of stairs that lead nowhere, a man-hungry 10-foot blonde and “dead moons and chicken bones” in a commanding, if weathered, voice, as if he’s author Philip K. Dick with a guitar. With his craggy, deep vocals, Wyndorf builds aural cinematic drama like a musical John Ford, the ominous acoustic guitar plucking and strums in the intros to “Paradise” and “I Live behind the Clouds” foreshadowing something evil coming this way or a showdown of half android, half human gunfighters in a parallel futuristic universe to Deadwood.

There is religious fervor in the stomping, hell-spawned blues of “Hallelujah,” where Wyndorf gives a wild-eyed sermon on sin and salvation that could make the dead rise and the righteous weep. And while the careening “Mindless Ones” works up a furious tempest of distorted, violent energy reminiscent of those whipped up by Hawkwind, in Monster Magnet’s disembodied hands, Donovan’s exotic “Three Kingfishers” undergoes a withering transformation into a heavy metal odyssey of the mind, “Stay Tuned” dives headlong into tunneling blackness and “The Duke (Of Supernature)” hitches a ride upriver through the conga drum currents of Black Sabbath’s “Planet Caravan.” Monster Magnet continues to go where others fear to tread.

 –   Peter Lindblad

CD Review: Vista Chino – Peace

Vista Chino – Peace

Napalm Records

All Access Review: A-

Vista Chino - Peace 2013

The names have been changed to protect … well, the brand. After stoner-metal giants Kyuss called it a day in 1995, the group’s following grew exponentially and calls for a reunion grew louder and louder as the years passed.

In 2011, John Garcia, Brant Bjork and Nick Oliveri toured as Kyuss Lives! Conspicuous by his absence, Josh Homme, having long ago moved on to Queens of the Stone Age, wanted no part of the much-anticipated reunion. More than that, however, he didn’t want anybody else using the Kyuss name either, and he, along with another former member, Scott Reeder, set in motion legal action to stop them from using it. Evidently, Homme was going out of his way to make damn sure this version didn’t tarnish the Kyuss legacy with some half-baked cash-grabbing nonsense that failed to include him.

Being the hardy desert folk they are, Garcia and Bjork, who played with Sabbath-influenced, muscle-car fanatics Fu Manchu for many years, have decided to carry on under a new name. Say hello to Vista Chino. Tuning down their guitars to deeply resonant levels, while still allowing shape-shifting melodies to drift in and out of a fuzz-toned haze, Vista Chino concocts a murky and strangely intoxicating brew on the musical sweat lodge that is the surging Peace, with the grumbling malevolence and guitar witchcraft of “Dragona Dragona” casting a particularly irresistible doom-laden spell.

Crispy around the edges, Peace is not the work of burnouts living off their past reputations, even if the record’s dank atmosphere is as smoky and close as any seedy drug house. A swirling maelstrom of burrowing, evil guitars, pummeling drums and splashing cymbals, rumbling rhythms and Garcia’s strong, illuminating vocals cutting through the sonic fog, Peace is thick, heady stuff, indeed, but it’s not exactly pretty.

Insidiously infectious and utterly compelling, “Adara” and “As You Wish” ride on hypnotic, writhing movements and grimy riffs into dark, scary places, while the dirty bomb of distortion known as “Planets 1 &2” drives Hawkwind’s space-rock aesthetic down to bad interplanetary neighborhoods and slides into a slow-motion slipstream that drowns all who follow it there in sludge and bong resin. There’s a bluesy feel to Peace that is inescapable, but it’s a dangerous, rough-and-tumble mutation of Cream’s heavy psychedelic visions, as the jazzy “Dark and Lovely” swings and tunnels ever deeper into a disordered mind, its grooves becoming more engorged as every second passes.

It all leads up to the tempest-tossed, mythic 13:25 closer “Acidize … the Gambling Moose,” a gloomy, gathering blues-rock storm whose immense winds blow trash and paper all over a lonely highway, some of it getting stuck in a dead tree’s spindly branches. Portending doom, it’s like a soundtrack for a Day of the Dead march in Mexico, as Vista Chino slows to a seductive crawl and a guitar solo pierces the gloaming of a truly evil-sounding love song. Vista Chino’s fevered imagination has finally gotten the best of them in the most surprising and interesting ways. They let songs and arrangements unfold organically, whereas Queens of the Stone Age seems hell-bent on making incongruous ideas fit, even though they never will. Vista Chino has its revenge. http://www.napalmrecords.com/

– Peter Lindblad 

CD Review: Hawkwind "Blood of the Earth"

CD Review:  Hawkwind "Blood of the Earth" 
Plastic Head North America
All Access Review:  B+

Major Tom is presumably still out there sitting in his tin can far above the moon, and from time to time, every couple of years or so, the unfortunate lost astronaut longing for his earthly home has probably watched the space-rock voyager Hawkwind rocket past his doomed ship, heading to parts unknown to any other musical entity of the last 40 years. Blood of the Earth is another mind-blowing trip through the psychedelic/prog-rock cosmos for a band that blasted off in 1969 and has put on more miles than all the space shuttles and astronauts in NASA combined.

Not quite as wild and wooly as 1973’s Space Ritual Live [live], but far more visionary than some of the atrocities of the late ‘90s and early 2000s committed in Hawkwind’s name, Blood of the Earth looks backward and forward, and eastward, for inspiration. On occasion, this version of Hawkind, with longtime leader Dave Brock (guitar, keyboards and vocals) still manning the captain’s chair and ably assisted by crewmen Richard Chadwick (drums), Niall Hone (guitars), Mr. Dibs (bass) and Tim Blake (keyboards), is capable of stirring up awesome cosmic tempests on command and shifting into the kind of maximum, hypnotic overdrive that would propel rhythm sections of the band’s glorious past through storming guitars, as they do on “Green Machine.” Pushing the needle into the red, Hawkwind takes off on a careening, metallic re-make of “You’d Better Believe It” from the 1974 LP Hall of the Mountain Grill with all the powerful thrust of Apollo 11, while the blurred rush of late-‘60s pyschedelia, propelled by airy horns, on the pulsating opener “Seahawks” is reminiscent of the Moody Blues in their prime.

The ultimate counter-culture tribe, one that is constantly creating planets of sound rather than visiting them physically on some “Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy”-like holiday, Hawkwind again merges prog-rock complexity, not to mention pomposity, with the sonic bombast of its space-rock imagination to stun us earthbound mortals as “Comfey Chair” builds and builds to a dramatic conclusion. But, Hawkwind doesn’t confine itself to building sci-fi soundscapes of wonderfully strange and trippy elements. The tribal beats that ground the soaring electronica and guitars that seem the aural equivalent of the Northern lights on another re-make, “Sweet Obsession,” from Brock’s 1984 solo effort Earthed to the Ground, lend an organic feel to the track, while the Middle Eastern-tinged “Wraith” is an exotic bazaar of instrumentation that has one foot in Persia and another in ancient alien worlds. 

Blood of the Earth doesn’t always captivate. There are valleys along with the peaks, places where everything is stagnant and seemingly not sure of where to go next. But overall, Blood of the Earth is typical Hawkwind in that it’s difficult to predict what direction their spaceship will go and the propulsive ride evokes a myriad of images and spacey effects that stirs the imagination.

- Peter Lindblad