Collider / Monochrome 7” Split (Fire Talk / Din Records)
For: Acid Mothers Temple, Sonic Youth, Comets on Fire
Byline: Denver serves up a platter of psychedelic rock at its finest. This year’s worst trip is also its best.
Wow, sorry about the lack of posts lately. It’s a good thing Ryan is so on top of stuff... but seriously, look at this first page. I’m squeezing this in just before my last one fell off the roll. Yikes. Rest assured, I’ve been sitting on a mountain of stuff that should get—NAY—needs to be posted, all of it well worth your time, so I’ll start chipping slowly away. I swear you’ll be hearing from me more often in the future. I promised Ryan Consulate General would come first... but this particular post is loooong overdue, and it’s just too good to pass up.
Ahoy - Denver, Colorado! Best known in recent years for producing... the Fray... this town is actually a pretty hip place to catch some progressive live music. Being in the center of the country has its disadvantages, for sure (Lord... the ocean, how I miss thee), but one cool thing is that a “scene” here doesn’t revolve around a single venue or a single style of music as it does with many other cities around our fair motherland. People come in from coast to coast to share their music with us, and this fact coupled with the undying diversity harbored by the amazing interwebs has allowed for a truly multi-faceted, colorful spectrum of music to emerge from the Mile High city. We’ve got our share of glo-fi here, we’ve got our share of new wave, we’ve got our share of experimental, we’ve got our share of hip hop, we’ve got our share of indie, we've got our share of folk, and we’ve got our share of psychedelic... and boy, do we ever have our share of psychedelic rock bands. Chief among the best of them are represented here on this wonderful 7” disc released this past February. Fissure Mystic wrote in their blog that each copy comes complete with its own hit of LSD. Even if they’re joking... uhmm... actually, they might not be joking. Order one for yourself and see. For $5, it’s worth checking.
“Collider” fills the Tjutjuna side of the disc, and is a Fire Talk release. Haven’t heard of Fire Talk, eh? You have now, and rest assured you’ll be hearing more from them. It’s a tape-only (well, and apparently 7”s are OK) label started by another Denver band, Woodsman, who just released an excellent full-length album on Mexican Summer. “Collider” isn’t so much a song as it is an interstellar journey at light speed with an untraceable warp signature. It's got an internal clock of its own that ticks unrelentingly forward towards an infinite apocalypse without blinking. The bass and drums hold this cyclone of sound down as long as possible before the entire mix is swept up in a maelstrom of breathtaking noise and chaos, only to lock back in moments later without so much as skipping a beat or looking back on the destruction caused in its wake. Lucky for us, they do this, like, three times, and each is successively orgiastic. Instruments are squeezed and shrieked beyond belief, breathing a living force into guitars that are haunted and tortured, and like being that way.
“Monochrome” is the Fissure Mystic side, and it’s a whale of a song. Transitioning nicely from the whirlwind Tjutjuna side, the track starts with a gnarly guitar lick matched note for note by pummeling snares and toms before leading into a magnificent sigh of a release—a throbbing half-time jam. Here the Fissures display the sweet side of psychedelia with a beautiful vocal melody rife with melancholia. The best music should be able to take you from majestic highs to devastating lows within minutes, and Fissure Mystic manages to do this several times over in a single track. Heavy syncopation propels the chorus, lifting the song into unforeseen heights before plummeting again into its coasting refrain with a giant splash. Everything’s given plenty of gestation time before the nightmarish opening riff returns for a final blast into oblivion.
And that, my friends, is how they do it in Denver. But you don’t have to take my word for it, head over to your local Fire Talk website and grab yourself a copy. You can hear these tunes on the bands’ respective MySpace pages, but this one is absolutely best when taken as the big ol’ pill o’ wax it was meant for. Swallow this one whole and fly high. You won’t regret it. (♪ Da-dun DUN! ♪)
--Craw’z 4/18/2010
Tjutjuna Official MySpace Page
Fissure Mystic Official MySpace Page
amen.
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