Nebula
To The Center

It starts like a cascade of icy water captured in slow motion, the rhythm, slow yet relentless, makes your knees tremble, throws you on a roadside in the desert, the center of the cosmos.
The wah wah wah tickles your ears, it's off-key music, music that grabs your testicles, twists them, but also provokes infinite pleasure as if it were Angelina Jolie dressed as a dominatrix doing it.
Nebula make acid and cursed music, but the good kind, they don't pull demons out of the drawer of your shames, rather they indulge and make you feel like the master of your party, of your ruin, give me another pill. Hunter Thompson kiss my arse.
Unlike other stoner groups that have chosen the easier path, selling out while pretending to be hard rockers who love music and "experimentation", the So-Cal Eddie, Ruben, and Mark, prefer to continue doing what pleases them most, even if that means not having a tour bus and sleeping on friends' couches who host them from city to city when on tour.

If only for this, the guys deserve respect. But "To The Center", the first album under Sub Pop, deserves respect also for the sound, dirty and captivating, co-produced by Jack Endino; a sound that projects you into a parallel dimension of "psychedelia", a thousand blurred suns, sand in your mouth, migratory hallucinations of 47 minutes, that, when they end, leave you exhausted and with the desire to take a pickup truck and escape towards the Nevada desert.
"Come Down" is irresistible, you have to move, dance, play air guitar, make faces at the mirror, you too are a rockstar for a day.
"Whatcha Looking For" continues with the same energy, somewhat worn-out lap dancers shaking their ass in the air, who cares, give me another beer bro, let's have a laugh, mount my horse baby, let's go watch the sunset at the edge of the world.
"Freedom" leaves the door open for you to spiritualize your ego, the tight drums following "realise your freeeeeedom", realize it boy, use it and don't throw it away like a fool, your time is now, tomorrow you could already be dead.
"Antigone" must be listened to at an indecent volume, with the car full of beers and psilocybin, feel like a god and to hell with the rest.
Mark Arm lends his sharp voice in the cover of the Stooges "I need Somebody", an obvious tribute chewed up and spit out without parody, perhaps making it even cooler than the original, it makes you want to touch yourself and engage in the most uninhibited autoerotism.
All the pieces have something special, a pure matrix of love for music, crossing the doors of perception and letting go, until the last track "You Mean Nothing", a distortion to decency, a great, giant Fuck you all, their trip that also becomes mine.

I'm on the top of the world, fuck everything, fuck you all. I've got Nebula to ride me tonight.