Tag Archives: psychedelia

ALBUM REVIEW: Poly-math – Zenith

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Trippy, dippy, and totally mind-bendy are the first things I think of when I hear the new release from Poly-math entitled Zenith (Nice Weather For Airstrikes). The opening track and the title track have this bombastic, slightly discordant saxophone that blends beat poetry, jazz, and psychedelia. Poly-math reminds me of the jazz fusion jam bands of the seventies and eighties; think Dixie Dregs, but with saxophones. Chris Olsen kills it on saxophone, by the way. Every song is elevated by his playing. If you play saxophone in a band, Olsen’s playing on this album is where you want to end up in your playing. 

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ALBUM REVIEW: Persefone – metanoia

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Persefone’s metanoia (Napalm Records) opens and it feels as if I’m watching an Andrew Lloyd Weber Broadway musical. Metanoia is atmospheric and grandiose; one would expect nothing less from Persefone. ‘Katabasis’ explodes onto the listener with a bombastic array of seventies progressive rock and psychedelia feel. Marc Martins Pia has shades of Yaz and Freddy Mercury on the opening track juxtaposed with the guttural vocalizations of death metal. The guitar work of Carlos Lozano Quintanilla and Filipe Baldaia are a wild mixture of mathematical genius, LSD, and a plethora of thirty-second note runs. ‘Katabasis’ can be an intense listen. 

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ALBUM REVIEW: Monolord – Your Time To Shine

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Five albums into a career as one of the top bands in the modern Stoner Doom scene, Monolord offers their mellow, tripped-out effort to date with Your Time To Shine (Relapse Records). While there’s still plenty of dank fuzziness to go around, it feels almost like a backdrop at times as the cleaner guitar textures are given near equal priority and the vocals are at their most prominent. Fortunately, it feels like more of a culmination of a gradual trajectory rather than a radical shift in direction; after all, these elements started gaining traction on 2019’s No Comfort and it’s easy to imagine guitarist/vocalist Thomas V. Jager’s 2020 solo album rubbing off on the process.

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