Brant Bjork
Jalamanta

Another "homemade" production, following the model of Jack Endino that I already brought to your attention, and another album that essentially went unnoticed at the time of its release (and even afterward, if we want to be honest). I'm talking about Brant's solo debut (year of grace - 1999), in which the ex-Kyuss member (then part of Fu Manchu) is busy furnishing sound rooms somewhere between the rarefied desolation of Palm Desert and surroundings and the most raw, fierce, minimal Acid-Punk. It's not the usual warmed-up soup based on Space and the most clichéd Stoner, nor is it an unoriginal repertoire of "desertic" clichés; this is a great little album that stands on its own merit. Why? I'll explain briefly, sparing you the yawns of the usual scenario.

First: for those who don't know (and I don't think there are many), B.B.'s "day job" is as a drummer. And it's not so common for a drummer to have the patience to get into the studio (Rancho de la Luna, Joshua Tree, for the record) to record, one by one, all the instruments aside from his own: bass, guitars, various percussions, even all (not many, to be honest) the vocal parts that you can hear amid the dunes of "Jalamanta"; after all, you certainly don't listen to such an album to find out about any vocal acrobatics... All his own work, as I was saying, except for one track ("Toot", lyrics and vocals by Mario Lalli of Fatso Jetson) and except for some - sporadic - guitar contributions by Gary Arce of Yawning Man. He does it all himself, and does it splendidly well. What can you say to that...? Listen to believe. It sounds like a real band here. Miracles of post-synchronization.

Second: the repertoire. Leftovers from the Kyuss era...? Perhaps. Tracks mostly based on a single chord, rarely straying from it...? True. But the laws of the desert are these, whether you like it or not. And no, I won’t repeat the usual, banal aphorism "the desert is a state of mind," with which you are probably fed up. That we take for granted, an indispensable premise for the enjoyment of the work. Instead, we'll add something else here: the repetitiveness, or rather the extreme regularity of certain compositions is the key to interpreting the album; it's a mature desert, the one in "Jalamanta", the desert of someone who has crossed it hundreds of times, of which there will always be, eternally, something left to say. Brant says it by creating music to space out, to dream, to wander; to lose oneself across vast expanses as far as the eye can see, across endless - and virtually infinite - stretches of arid and rocky lands, among the expanses and mirages of highways to the steady rhythm of an endless journey. This too might sound rhetorical, perhaps because you've read something similar about Kraftwerk in "Autobahn"; because yes, we are still talking about the "road", but of very different environments. Neither would it serve to explain why, except that we are on the scorching asphalt of a Californian summer, and not in the Rhineland or in Bavaria.

Third: the sound impact. And in such scenarios of extreme monotone, it is not exactly a secondary factor. How much I hear the Sabbath of "Master Of Reality" in here, you can't imagine unless you listen, and how many "iommi-like" guitars, how much psychedelia, how many cosmic-exotic suggestions akin to the Flower Travellin' Band. The slower pieces wrap around like the coils of gigantic sound "reptiles" (listen to the shamanic rhythms of "Cobra Jab"; but where did he learn those Arabic scales, if until the other day he was sitting behind timpani and snare drum...?); they enchant, dragging into ecstasy (take "Let's Get Chinese Eyes": an intro on drums that couldn’t be more "jazzy" and guitar wonders that could make the Mad River of "Eastern Light" envious); they deeply penetrate the essence of a distant Blues, really quite distant from the genre’s typical elements (in "Automatic Fantastic" you can hear a Clapton at 40 degrees in the shade). Distortion, corrosion, release: and in the release lies the sense of the angriest episodes, those that stun, those that resemble jams potentially lasting one or two hours. But on this point, the titles will spare me quite a bit of work: what more do I have to tell you about a "Low Desert Punk"...? Just reading it is enough to understand, even before listening...

A TRIP THROUGH THE SOULFUL SIDE OF THINGS: this is what the cover notes state, and it seems a similarly eloquent phrase to me. Am I forgetting something...? Oh yes, that the album was reissued three times by Duna Records, Brant's own label. In short: the master of the house took care of both singing and playing, in every sense.

Over to you.