Revisionist Western

There are a few things I love unequivocally:  Two person sludge bands.  Two person sludge bands with no guitar.  Two person sludge bands with no guitar that you could imagine kids skateboarding to in the 90s.  Thosar is, decidedly, all three.  Hailing from Weiz, Austria, Thosar play a manic, energetic style of bass/drums sludge that feels like a cross between 90s groove metal bands like Unsane, Helmet, and Quicksand, and noisy, stoner skate punk like California X or Bummer. The thing I like about bands like this is they often have a shaggy sort of "hey, dude, let's start a band" vibe to them that I find incredibly endearing. There's something about two people playing sludge with just two instruments, neither of which are the instrument we most associate with the genre, that feels like the fun of a basement show distilled to its essence to me. Thosar captures that feeling very well on Elementa. The album has an almost improvisational feel to it, with the son...

Jakethehawk is a heavy psych band from Pittsburgh whose newest album, Hinterlands, came out last month, by which I mean February, because in my head it's still March, because time has no meaning anymore. Anyway, I've been meaning to write about this one for a bit because it's one of the best stabs at this kind of music I've heard anytime recently.  As someone whose tastes veer more towards the heavy-and-loud, it's tragically easy for a band to screw up psychedelic rock for me. If it starts to feel a little bit too much like I'm listening to Cream or The Grateful Dead instead of Sabbath, I'll start to lose interest. I do tend to like dreamy, psychedelic stuff, though, it just also has to satisfy my desire, nay, my demand  for the almighty riff to be prominently featured in my heavy music.  Jakethehawk kind of nails it.  I would compare them to bands like Sigils, Serial Hawk, or Dead Meadow, all of whom are good at interspersing long passages of ambient, dron...