Sons Of Otis
Seismic

Do you want some advice? Turn everything off. Televisions, radios, and especially, that damn de-evolutionary machine known as the personal computer. Leave your house, if you can, after eating, in the evening. Look up at the sky, and gaze at that hidden mastodon which, since the dawn of time, has prevented us from obtaining any cognitive orientation. Sky, universe, space: call it whatever the hell you like. But it is to it that you owe everything. And especially, it is to it that you owe “Seismic” (2012), the latest work by one of my favorite bands, as well as the primary divinity of the contemporary space-stoner-doom pantheon.

This year, Small Stone has delivered outrageously well-produced gems. And for the first time, it has given one of the most seminal acts in the history of this niche genre, the opportunity to bow to its most voracious followers, with unprecedented space-inspired nuances. The Quality of the sounds: this time, above all, is the real and mirror-like innovation able to reflect the spectral and enthu-asmatic potential of THC.

In the face of anyone, I say, go and listen to an album like this. For 3 fundamental reasons: the first, related to the warmth with which tracks like Far From Fine or Guilt, manage to erase all of humanity, the ground you pretend to still tread upon, and anything else materially conceived, to catapult your pineal gland into collision with the most remote places of the firmament; the second, because perhaps, after more than 15 years, Ken Baluke and Frank Sargeant align their pachydermic instrumental tone with a drummer who’s incredibly skilled, giving a damn, cathartic, and unexpected sense to their career of audicular-sensitive experimentation; the third and final reason, because this album, 'parks it' gently in the 'corporate backstage' for all those who consider space-doom a genre that has now gone to de-solidify. No, ladies and gentlemen. I may also be labeled as a purist, but I’m yet to hear line-ups so capable, dedicated, brazenly but responsibly drugged, and assembled in this way. And then, with other tracks, such as Alone, Lessons and Never In my Life: granite songs, solemn like interstellar radiation, appropriately lysergic, and extremely weed-inductive.

So, after tons of astral void filled with fuzz, rat-distortion, and wah modulators of varied nature, here comes the orgiastic apotheosis of listening: Cosmic Jam. Probably, one of the best space-blues ballads of humanitarian eternity. Delay as if Woodstock were being re-enacted on Neptune, phaser and flanger more than stubborn and powerful, but also a cannonade of delicate and detuning bendings. In short, everything a doom-addict doped on stoner would ask Santa Claus for, while smoking with him a fat, interstellar Chillum of infinite peace.

Get it, sir Michael Bublé? Pray to Osiris that your honeyed mall box set never falls upon this unmissable, hallucinogenic, ecstatic album. It would probably burn.

Repent, because once the CD starts, the end will not be ‘near’ at all.

Fortunately..