Tag: Brian Jonestown Massacre

PLAYING DETROIT: Mountains and Rainbows “Particles”

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Once hailed “The Best Band That Doesn’t Have an Album” pysch-rockers Mountains and Rainbows can finally re-categorize themselves.  After bouncing around for almost a decade with nothing but a cassette tape and some scattered demos, Mountains and Rainbows caught the ears of  Thee Oh Sees frontman John Dwyer after sharing a bill with the head rattling 70s art punk revivalist foursome last year. Dwyer signed them to Castle Face Records and released their double debut LP Particles last month. Particles is more than an album, though. It’s a transient, transcendent head trip that sweats and absorbs in equal measure. There is a boldness to the album as an adventure through time and memory, trailing across stateliness and atmospheric boundaries, that convinces you to overturn yourself as if you were some government implemented barrier between happiness and obligation. Particles is salty and dry, thirst inducing and never quenching.  It is that very thirst that makes Mountains and Rainbows’ long awaited exploration of chaos so surprisingly satisfying. It’s a high without the hangover.

It’s hard to consider the album as individual tracks. The songs blend together, not monotonously or statically, but with a meticulously reckless smashing. Each song strikes one another forcing tinier and finer divides like an astral phenomena we read about but never actually see. Sludgy, strung out Velvet Underground-esque track “Fancies” breaks the album up and clocks in at just over ten minutes. It’s anxious and uneasy and feels more like a band warmup where the instruments sound like vocals and the vocals are a series of warbled announcements. This is a complete departure from the bouncy beach party track “How You Spend Your Time,”  which is tightly composed and fulfills the albums strained pop tendency. Mountains and Rainbows play with distance and warped dissonance, which invites a cosmic spacial awareness that lends itself to feeling like fabric ripped at the seams. Drums seem to interrupt, the guitars are manic and distressed and the bass is spastically metallic. These elements crowd the vocals in such a way that it often feels like attempts to suffocate, but also is aurally victorious at regaining breath. Considering it is their first “proper” release, Particles is a fully formed thought that is not for the faint of heart, rather for those whose heart beat persistently askew.

Particles is streaming over at Hype Machine.

Listen to the track “How You Spend Your Time” below:

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Mountains and Rainbows record release show wag Bonny Doon, Feelings and Dead Beat Beat at El Club, Detroit 6/24

 

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PLAYING DETROIT: Moonwalks “Lunar Phases”

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Few bands are as aptly named as psychedelic Detroit four piece, Moonwalks, whose upcoming release Lunar Phases could act as a wild, yet tailored, road map to uninhabited galaxies and black holes, alike. The band’s first LP, scheduled to release via cassette tape and digital download later this month (MANIMAL Vinyl) is as warm as it is cooly intergalactic and is as 1960’s retro as it is refreshingly modern. Collectively, Jake Dean (guitars/vocals) Kate Gutwald (bass), Kerrigan Pearce (drums) and Tyler Grates (guitar) admit to being moved by the production of old Lee Hazlewood records, which makes sense, considering Lunar Phases has an undeniably sultry, Western-shootout vibe. (If the shootout was between aliens and cowboys, directed by a 90’s Tarantino respectfully.) “We’re becoming more collaborative as a four piece,” says Grates. “When making music, it’s important for me not to consider any influences I have at the time. Anything can sound like everything. However, it’s a little different in the recording process. We all have similar taste but different ideas, so we’re constantly coming up with different landscapes of sound.” More than Brian Jonestown Massacre-esque jam rock moments or sedated Jeffry Lee Pierce vocals, Moonwalks’ sound is the figurative dusting off of something once lost. Like water on Mars, Lunar Phases taps into what you thought you knew, but with an exploratory freshness best suited for lovers of reverb, distortion, and unexpectedly emotive cosmic collisions of past and present.

What is most surprising of their debut LP is the seamless cohesion not only between tracks, but in Moonwalks’ shared cadence, notably in their confidence in letting each instrument/effect have space to swell, breathe, and explode. This is glaringly apparent on vocal-less track “Cream Cheese Ashtray,” a demanding instrumental that gives the aural illusion of bending time; warped but never “off,” askew but never elementary nor hesitant. Delay heavy track, “Painted Lady” (one of two songs named after beloved Detroit bar/venues) is reminiscent of early Black Rebel Motorcycle Club minus the cliche hook/verse progression, artfully distorting your notion of what comes next; another example of Moonwalks’ ability to give new life to the already familiar.

Lunar Phases is, for the lack of a better word, mature. The album, a richly dynamic and attentive mosaic just under thirty minutes long, manages to achieve the robust fluidity that most bands don’t find until their second or third release (if at all). With extensive touring planned for the coming year and by the sounds of it, more studio time, too, Moonwalks exudes a completeness but with ample room to morph, grow, and reimagine. “I think were becoming tighter as a band,” Grates explains. “We’re getting more comfortable with playing shows and touring around the country. I think if the four of us weren’t in a band together, we’d still be hanging out all the time.”

While we await the release of Lunar Phases, satisfy your hunger by checking out Moonwalks’ 2014 EP:

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