CD Review: Brant Bjork and The Low Desert Punk Band – Black Power Flower

CD Review: Brant Bjork And The Low Desert Punk Band – Black Power Flower
Napalm Records
All Access Rating: B+

Brant Bjork And The Low Desert
Punk Band - Black Power Flower 2014

Coated in psychedelic fuzz and deep-fried to a crisp in a bubbling vat of distortion, Black Power Flower doesn't go too far off the desert-rock reservation formerly inhabited by Kyuss.

Once the drummer for the pioneering stoner-metal outfit, whose legend seems to grow by the day, Brant Bjork – now a permanent fixture in Vista Chino with his old Kyuss running mate, John Garcia – takes on multi-instrumentalist duties with a new project that bears his name, Brant Bjork And The Low Desert Punk Band.

Now out on Napalm Records, Black Power Flower is a gritty, psychotropic stew of heavy, intoxicating riffs, mind-altering effects, dirty blues and ominous undercurrents. Gathering momentum in the aftermath of a doom-laden intro that recalls early Black Sabbath, the heady opener "Controllers Destroyed" becomes engorged with voluminous guitars, rumbling bass and bashed drums. Thick and rugged, "We Don't Serve Their Kind" goes from a slow burn to a steady, thundering stampede, while "Stokely Up Now" sounds more clear headed and lively, its guitars coming into sharper focus with repeated listens.

The rest of Black Power Flower is a smoky, fetid room littered with seeds and stems, junk food wrappers, pizza boxes and filthy bongs, its denizens, such as "Buddha Time (Everything Fine)" and "Soldier of Love," buzzed and slipping into comfortable comas, where tracks seem indistinguishable from one another. That's not such a terrible thing. Every track here is easy to like, throbbing with underlying tension and brimming with menacing, strong grooves that only seem lazy to the uninitiated, solid riffs with a little bit of bite to them and rhythms that move with a muscular grace. And just to show he's not a one-trick pony, Bjork tries his hand at buttery '70s funk with "That's Fact Jack" and bumps and grinds through the smoldering, sexed-up blues of "Hustler's Blues," both attempts satisfyingly seductive, earthy and organic, if not terribly original. Black Power Flower plants a seed. Now watch Brant Bjork and The Low Desert Punk Band grow.
– Peter Lindblad

CD Review: John Garcia – John Garcia

CD Review: John Garcia – John Garcia
Napalm Records
All Access Rating: B+

John Garcia - John Garcia 2014

The name John Garcia still carries a lot of weight among glazed-over dwellers of the desert/stoner metal community. People there will never forget what he did with the archetypal Kyuss, having blazed rough trails through the most unforgiving of sonic terrain.

There are cults that would kill for the kind of devotion Garcia and the rest of Kyuss have inspired. And although Josh Homme has gone on to bigger and better things with Queens Of The Stone Age, his Kyuss co-founder has not so quietly built an impressive and remarkably consistent catalog of recordings with projects such as Slo-Burn, Unida, Hermano and, most recently, Vista Chino.

That arid, distant voice of his a dagger cutting straight through the sonic haze, vague menace and hypnotic pull of a sub-genre he helped establish, Garcia goes the lone-wolf route on this his first solo album, out on Napalm Records. Leaner and more clean-shaven than other works his name's been attached to, although some of the fuzz remains, John Garcia is a record with a strong pulse and an undeniable affinity for the brawny riffs and catchy hooks of '70s classic rock, as "5000 Miles" sounds like ZZ Top trying to swim its way out of quicksand and the steely, acoustically sketched closer "Her Bullets Energy" reminiscent of Led Zeppelin's brushed folk supplications, with a little Spanish guitar thrown in for good measure.

And while "Argleben," heavy and trance-inducing, is deep-fried in distortion and stuck in great, thick groove ruts – the album is full of them – "My Mind" rides with Steppenwolf into dark skies rumbling with heavy-metal thunder, all the while brandishing guitars wrapped in barbed-wire. Every song on John Garcia is sinister and seductive, sounding mean as hell on the agitated, pounding post-punk engagement "All These Walls." He swims with especially strong currents in the rugged, mid-tempo, swinging hammer "Rolling Stoned," the deliriously infectious "Saddleback" and the spellbinding, serpentine "Flower," as a sense of unease pervades the throbbing "His Bullets Energy," its slashing guitars and unpredictable bass counter melody stalking its prey with murderous intentions and practically begging for a restraining order.

Notwithstanding the sluggish blues of "Confusion" and its equally sedentary "The Blvd," John Garcia crackles with energy and brands its deep, dynamic grooves into your brain. Guests like Danko Jones, Nick Oliveri and Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger – his intricate work can be found on "Her Bullets Energy" – go with Garcia on this vision quest and help him discover his true nature.
– Peter Lindblad

Best of 2013 in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal – Part 1

The number of this beast is 20, as in top 20

By Peter Lindblad

There are many questions left unanswered from the year of our Lord 2013. 

One of them being, what exactly is an "Earth Rocker" and, as a follow-up question to Clutch, how do they differ from normal, everyday rockers? Also, why Summon the Faithless, Lord Dying? Is something nefarious afoot? 

And what about Monster Magnet's Last Patrol? Should we read anything into that title? And should you engage in a transaction with a Venomous Rat Regeneration Vendor, what are you actually purchasing? Zombie rodents? Would you buy such a thing from a man named Rob Zombie?

To say the least, hard rock and heavy metal had its share of scary, off-the-wall characters making ridiculously powerful music in 2013. Ozzy even sounded semi-coherent as three-fourths of the original Black Sabbath came back from the grave with a vengeance. As ill as he's been, Lemmy still barreled through Aftershock like a man possessed by demons, which is just the way Lemmy likes it. And former Hanoi Rocks frontman Michael Monroe showed everyone he's full of just as much piss and vinegar as guys half his age.

So, here we present the best metal and hard rock records of 2013 in this four-part series, counting down from 20 and headed toward No. 1. 

Amon Amarth - Deceiver of the Gods 2013

20. Amon Amarth: Deceiver of the Gods – Maybe this Norse metal thing has finally run its course with death metal Vikings Amon Amarth. Even the gods are wondering if its time Amon Amarth gave it a rest. Still, the gory Deceiver of the Gods, with its mighty blend of traditional melodic metal forms and good old fashioned thrash, is a mammoth production, a big boiling kettle of massive riffs, hairy vocal bellows and roiling rhythms that swings precariously to and fro, constantly spilling its contents over the edge. And Amon Amarth worshippers lapped up every drop.

Lord Dying - Summon the Faithless 2013

19. Lord Dying: Summon the Faithless – Stirring up a sea of sludge, coating it in crusty distortion and fashioning it into menacing shapes defined by crunching riffs and hardened grooves, Lord Dying staked its claim to Black Sabbath's throne as the masters of doom metal. Made of pure evil, Summon the Faithless is that shadowy figure of an album hiding around the corner, waiting to snatch whoever happens to walk by with a myriad of rusty hooks that could give whoever hears it tetanus. Make sure you're up on all your shots.

Rob Zombie - Venomous Rat Regeneration
Vendor 2013

18. Rob Zombie: Venomous Rat Regenerator – Chaos reigns supreme in the circus world of Venomous Rat Regenerator, where demented bartender Rob Zombie and partner John Five whip up a lethal cocktail of hot, grinding industrial-metal riffage, hard-hitting dance beats and complete auditory madness. If any asylum could ever be described as "fun" or having a "party-like atmosphere," this is it. The inmates are running Venomous Rat Regenerator, inviting all manner of freaks, and they are throwing the bash of the century.

Saxon - Sacrifice 2013

17. Saxon: Sacrifice – Saxon sacrificed nothing on its last album. The grizzled New Wave of British Heavy Metal veterans mixed in some thrash stomp and made some of the toughest, most durable rock of their career. Wrecking-ball riffs and beautifully intertwined dual-guitar salvos each find their space on Sacrifice, which also incorporates touches of folk instrumentation on an otherwise hard-nosed, blue-collar epic that packs quite a wallop.

Vista Chino - Peace 2013

16. Vista Chino: Peace – Peace sells, and it should be bought by the truckload. Heavy and languid, with a wonderfully homegrown, hazy stoner-metal aesthetic hanging in the air, Peace could have sounded inert, stuck in a past where too many Kyuss fans choose to live. It doesn't. Rather, Vista Chino moves in mysterious and intoxicating ways. Instead, it's seductive, like an older brother daring you to smoke pot for the first time, and earthy, as if early Sabbath spent more  time in hippie communes, as opposed to graveyards. In a word, it sounds "natural," which is something that can't be said anymore for Queens of the Stone Age, that other Kyuss-related band. 

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