Unsurprisingly, there isn’t much of a surfing culture in New Hampshire. We only have about 18 miles of coastline and a climate that creates a relatively brief window for visiting the beach. Not to mention our abundance of mountains and snow has always made snowboarding our state’s dominant board-related sport.…
Here is one of the indelible facts of music: as time moves on, that which is considered heavy, experimental, ground breaking, or any other choice of adjective which is used to denote the “novel”, will wear thin its welcome. Progressive and psychedelic rock is a fantastic example. There were days…
The quintessential difficult decision is almost always a “lesser of two evils” situation. In music, this typically manifests in an artist’s path forward; do they forge ahead along the charted path, or divert into untrodden territory? We can look at bands like Opeth, Kayo Dot and Ulver as examples of…
The fields of psychedelic rock are filled with all sorts of strange flowers. Just recently, we spoke about how we’re witnessing an especially vibrant and potent flowering this year, with all sorts of takes on stoner, doom, and psychedelic rock popping up all around us. Gladly, this trend doesn’t show…
Despite the seemingly straightforward nature of drone, the style is a great deal more varied in practice. For drone metal in particular, the idea of drawing out doom to an even more low, slow and meditative state relies on each individual band’s interpretation of the genre they’re extrapolating from. As…
I still remember the first time I played Fuck the Sun, Stone From the Sky’s previous album (yes, that’s actually what it’s called). What I don’t quite remember is what I was expecting but it wasn’t an expansive, droned out, psychedelic walk through sunlit hills, nature in bloom all around…
Motorpsycho are a hard band to grapple with; their career, as we have told you before, stretches all the way back to the end of the 80’s. They’ve also ping ponged between numerous genres, always fixated upon progressive rock but blending in influences from jazz, pop, country, post-rock, and more.…
Finland’s Hexvessel bill themselves as “Psychedelic Forest Folk Rock”, which, while a mouthful, does a pretty good job of describing the type of music you’re in for when you listen to one of their albums. Blending neo-folk with psychedelic rock is not a new thing, but Hexvessel do it with…
Sometimes, it’s perfectly clear that an album was produced by a group of seasoned genre veterans. Once you’ve spent enough time with a certain style of music, you can pick out exactly what defines a refined approach; namely, a heightened focus on composition over instrumental flash. In my experience, this…
As a music reviewer, it’s difficult to know when our proclamations will be proven right or wrong. The nature of the modern music makes a multi-album year and a new album every several years both seem perfectly normal (if not always ideal). This being the case, we can never be sure…
