I’ll be honest with you: I’m having a rough time with the feedback heavy genres as of late. No doom nor stoner are really grabbing my attention, except for a few excellent releases like King Witch or Netherlands. Well, and Dirt Woman, who I’m here to tell you about today. It seems as if for anything slow and fuzz heavy to penetrate my ears today it needs to have a heavy dose of psychedelia or an epic sort of proportion to it. Luckily, Dirt Woman have both as their most recent release, The Glass Cliff, navigates huge cliffs of guitar chords and evokes the sort of wild, trippy energy I seem to be craving lately.
Honestly, the artwork does a lot of heavy lifting here; that sort of science fiction, weird, and otherworldly vibe is exactly the sort of vibe I was alluding to above. It helps that the music follows along. Listen to second track “Creator” for example; boy golly do these guitars go low! But more than their bottomless tone, what I love about them is how evocative they are in their dedication to the atmosphere which the album works to create, an atmosphere further amplified by the excellent, sun-burnt vocals which round everything off. Add in the dripping drums (mostly those marvelous cymbals on display with “Creator”) and you get that trip among the stars sort of sound that this kind of music does best.
This is truly an album for aficionados of the genre but I think it stands above the crop by virtue of its dedication to the craft and the aesthetic which it tries to convey. Head on over to the Bandcamp link above to check out the full thing for yourself; like a lot of these psychedelic, expansive albums, it’s a journey best experienced as a whole.