Hills
Alive At Roadburn

'Alive at Roadburn' (recorded live at the Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, Netherlands in 2016) is a live album by Hills, a psychedelic rock ensemble from Gothenburg (Sweden), released last March 17th via Rocket Recordings, thus renewing a collaboration between the band and the label that has been ongoing since 2013 and has proven to be quite fruitful so far.

Despite being a live performance, the recording quality is very high and probably because it was captured in this context, Hills' music, clearly inspired by the founding fathers of Swedish psychedelia (Parson Sound and their various incarnations later as International Harvester and Trad, Gras & Stenar), expresses itself to the fullest of its potential and manifests wild and uncontrolled fury. In four tracks that evoke a drone shamanism and where more obsessive heavy-psych sounds blend with the Californian psychedelia of the sixties ('National Drone'); kraut-rock reminiscences on Motorik 4/4 ('Frigorande Musik'); vigorous bass grooves accompanied by a drum that reflects the more intricate and spectacular constructions of Can and enveloping electric guitar riffs ('Master Sleeps'); a long tantric and meditative-spiritual session ('Oh Solen Sankte Sig Rod').

The heart of the entire performance itself has an evident ritual component, expressed also through evocative vocalisms, which the band itself wanted in some way to invoke in the calling to those forces of the pagan gods of the midsummer festivals, burning within their souls like spirits amidst the flames of bonfires on the shores of the fjords overlooking the Baltic Sea on the eve of St. John's.