Nebula
Atomic Ritual

The atomic ritual kicks off screeching from early '70s Detroit, sufficiently revved up by iguana interiors and a tank full of "wild power." It drifts between Seattle and '67 London, learning to drive from a long-haired guy with a penchant for glissando, dodges rush hour traffic, fills the trunk with space effects at the "Dik Mik Market" in Notting Hill, and heads straight into the end of the last century, when Uncle Wynford preferred peyote over amatriciana.

At the wheel, naturally, is Eddie Glass, someone who's swapped the rings of Saturn for a Nascar circuit, currently the man with the most psychedelic hairstyle in the whole building. He plays the guitar more or less like I do when I'm home alone, cranking up the stereo and grabbing the toilet brush in "Gibson devil" mode. He sings with that mix of smugness and permanent skatso that Scott Hill has instilled in him, and his fingers do things that a lonely, bored housewife wouldn't hesitate to call "rather interesting."

He's got Ruben Romano as navigator-drummer (another ex-pat from beach bums Fu Manchu), and since even Nico Cereghini suggests "Helmet fastened tight, lights on even during the day, and a good bassist... always!", he takes along the newly-arrived Tom Davies, a curious specimen of stoner boy with Peter Pan syndrome, stubbornly trapped in the body of a seventeen-year-old.

The chronicles of the journey are all found in this 2003 full-length: a boiling magma of hard rock stuffed with fuzz, where molecules of stoner and garage rock in pure "rama rama fa fa fa style" mingle with the noble gases of Hendrixian wah wah.

It's an album, just to be clear, that loves to wear a space suit over one of those corduroy suits my father wore when he was young, when he still had the quiff and mustache that smelled of women: hard to file away as just another "stoner" album due to the effortless way it mixes garage irreverence, goofy heavy blues and sweatily southern Big Muff reinterpretations of vintage rock (one can only hope Page never hears "The Beast"), and psychedelic dust halfway between desert and outer space ("Paradise Engineer"), almost as if channeling the spirits that haunted the excellent "To The Center" ('99).

Not everything, it must be said, works as it should under the spaceship's hood. Because if the attack of the opener-title track really seems like the frenzy unleashed when the light turns green, and if Glass's guitar flair manages the titanic feat of making the riffing of "More" not seem banal, in at least a couple of instances (including the pointless "Electric Synapse"), the feeling is that there's more craft than adrenaline, more clutch than accelerator.

The result, once again, isn't transcendental, but it undeniably merits bringing the Californian trio—at least partially—back onto the path charted by their first, excellent works, after the (good, but overly) polished interlude of the previous "Charged" ('01). A journey that may not solve the rock tourism agency crisis, but at least it proudly flaunts muscles, fringes, buttocks poking out from jean miniskirts, and spaceships fueled by Long Island.

"When "Fin" comes on, you know the journey is over.

You sit down, stretch your legs, and watch the sunset, knowing you can stare it in the eye without getting hurt.
You search for the pack and smile when you discover you have enough left to wait for dawn.
You take one. You gently trap it between your lips.
For a moment, your face lights up with the glow of a bonfire igniting in your hands.

You inhale..."