Festwca

I listened to it this morning with a headache and I think I'll stay dazed until mid-afternoon.

Full album on Bandcamp: MUSK | MUSK

I wanted to say that their first three albums have just been reissued on beautiful vinyl by Stickman: Liquid is perfect in this format. I discovered them just after the breakup and was fascinated by Liquid and Phase V, but I had dismissed the earlier ones as "too stoner." I'm going to dig them up again.

I've listened to White Noise and Asks Questions Later to the point of nausea; I have this one but I remember it as colorless, like the debut of Firewater gives it quite a few tracks. I'm going to listen to it again.

Listened to it twice today: there's a bit of everything in here... and I like most of it. Damn, I would buy it but I've been overdoing it lately. Next album they'll cut off my power.

But this is a super extra report! I’m going to gather the material.

I thank Ramona for introducing me to this album, which has become one of my favorites over the years.

The Ram and Hesitant Grand Light could fit on Hex but they have little drone and little electric; Future Verbs comes closer (I can't quite grasp it and I like it); Wax Chance and Maximum Hexadic are Japanese noise space messes like Fushitsusha or Kurihara, and Sphere Path Code C goes back even further (Chrome?). Vestige is something like "flood" by Boris, which is more drone in the classic sense. Hollow River is indeed reminiscent of Earth or Sunn O))) in a nasty way, but it's just an episode. Guild (great piece) again has that wild, chaotic guitar like Haino, plus a bass that gives it a doom cadence, but I don't think we're anywhere near Earth territory; moreover, it ends languidly with a harmonica. In general, I feel little drone and doom here: the dark atmospheres remind me more of stuff like no wave, Glenn Branca, etc., and the guitars take me back to noise neo-psychedelia, and in some ways we go back to the late '60s (after all, it's always the Six Organs). I don't think, as you say, that "any drone stuff made with an electric guitar has to crash against the Earth": the Earth only connect if you add Black Sabbath; drone stuff with electric guitars has always been made. Overall, it's a good record (which I too hastily dismissed with a "I don't like it") of randomly generated stuff that has been heard a billion times before. The Earth are in there but not in the foreground.

I didn't like the album; if I have to listen to Chasny playing noisy guitars, I might as well go back to the great Comets On Fire or any of the thousand other bands that have done this kind of thing but in a more interesting way. I didn't like the review either: it's full of typos and fails to mention, for example, that Chasny created a method based on algorithms and card drawing to write this album, which generates infinite musical patterns. But then, where have you heard the Earth here?

Yes, but have you listened to it today? I liked it too, but it has an all-out, reverb-heavy '80s production, even in the vocals (of course, there’s worse); it might just be my issue, but I really can't handle these '80s sounds in 2015.