Monster Magnet - Fathers of stoner-rock

It's a satanic drug thing, you wouldn't understand

The ties to currents of the past and the desire to bring them back to life, even at the cost of limiting oneself, at least initially, to an outright revival, are often decisive in the birth of a band. Monster Magnet started precisely from the premise of picking up the legacy of their idols, whose milestones are remembered with admiration and a desire to keep them more alive than ever. In doing so, however, they set out on a new path whose roots are indeed planted in the 60s and 70s, but whose course leads to a different style, meatier and unprecedented.

Alongside other bands like Kyuss, Fu Manchu, Masters of Reality and Sleep, Monster Magnet are indeed among the fathers of stoner-rock: a movement that encompasses bands each with their own approach, all united by a strong bond with the acid suggestions of the 60s and the spatial expansions of the 70s. The ability of stoner bands to forge a new style from those reference points, rather than simply rehashing them slavishly, revitalized the rock scene in the 90s. 

Stoner sinks its roots into the classic decades of rock, taking the slow, heavy riffs of Black Sabbath, the acid-hard-bluesy saturations of Blue Cheer, Sir Lord Baltimore, Leaf Hound and Cream, the sprawling, captivating space-rock of Hawkwind and Captain Beyond. These are the common foundations, the lowest common denominator that the bands belonging to the movement have gone on to tint, time and again, with the most varied influences, and it's especially in Monster Magnet that we find many of these connections that would go on to influence countless bands: references ranging from Led Zeppelin to ZZ Top, from hard-rock in general to the rawness of garage-rock (Stooges, Mc5), from the psychedelic sounds of the Doors to the more recent sludge innovations of Melvins and the grunge of Soundgarden, from Frank Zappa ("The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet") to Delta blues and the acid blues of Jimi Hendrix, right up to the desert-rock scene of Southern California in the late 80s. 

Stoner doesn't rely on flaunting virtuosity (in this respect linking back to punk and garage-rock), but when needed it unleashes a razor-sharp solo. 80s metal, positioned chronologically between the stoner bands and their points of reference, is almost skipped over, as if to say "what would have happened if we'd gone straight from Hawkwind and Black Sabbath to today", though it's not disowned either, particularly with regard to the influence of the psychedelic doom-metal of Cathedral. In some cases, in fact, stoner-rock comes very close to doom-metal and sludge-metal, when it doesn't openly blend with them, and for some bands that are generally heavier and more metallic, the music press often uses the term stoner-metal interchangeably with stoner-rock.

But influences alone aren't enough to define the stoner sound, made up of cosmic trips layered over magmatic distortions made even meatier by down-tuned guitars (which some bands, like Kyuss, would take even further by running the guitar through a bass amp), characteristically monolithic riffs, and rhythms that move now impetuously, now at a measured pace. Let's now sum up the history of Monster Magnet, who among the genre's reference points are the ones most tied to space-rock.

The story of Monster Magnet begins in Red Bank, New Jersey, with the meeting of the charismatic Dave Wyndorf (vocals, guitar), coming from the punk band Shrapnel, and guitarist John Paul McBain, also a former punk musician, with stints in bands like Skinhead Nation and Smoking Pets. They were joined by Tom Diello on drums and Tim Cronin on bass. With this lineup they initially took the name Dog of Mystery, then Airport 75, before settling on the one they're known by today.

In their early days the band threw themselves into massive, mesmerizing live shows, in which the mixed flavor of solitude and freedom evoked by the vastness of the American desert imagery combined with the use of soft drugs, a distinctive reworking of certain rock classics, and hybrid themes, suspended between materialism and spiritualism. 

Over these years, Wyndorf and co. put out a handful of demos with suitably blunt titles – "Forget About Life", "I'm High On Dope" and "I'm Stoned, What Ya Gonna Do About It?" in 1989 – followed the next year by a scrappy (and ultimately seminal) self-titled Ep: all works that highlight their most acid, noisy and psychedelic influences, earning them a certain underground notoriety that would eventually lead the band to sign with Caroline Records.

So in December 1991 in Europe (February 1992 in the US) their debut album, Spine Of God, came out, almost entirely the brainchild of Wyndorf, who incidentally officially kicked off the stoner movement, alongside "Blues For The Red Sun" by Kyuss (from the Palm Desert scene in California, whose official debut had come out the previous year) released just a few months later; compared to Kyuss, Monster Magnet come across here as less "noise/hardcore" and more "space".

The album showcases a distinctive, expressive sound, built on steady tempos, bluesy touches around the edges, intermittent basslines, dry drumming gliding easily over thick distortion, and visionary, enveloping vocal flights. The sound is made particularly rough by their arsenal of effects, with fuzz and reverb serving as the band's calling card, but above all it's the songwriting that reaches for simple, heavy melodies to build songs around, constantly straddling a Hendrix-style psych-blues and huge Sabbath-esque riffs steeped in acid atmospheres. The faster, more urgent tracks also draw on Detroit garage rock/proto-punk, which Wyndorf tints with lysergic heaviness. The biggest influences overall remain Hawkwind and Captain Beyond, in the "spacey" atmospheric digressions, and Black Sabbath, in the more repetitive, darker riffs and penetrating basslines (and also in the vocal lines, which more than once echo Ozzy's monotone timbre).

There's also a successful cover of Grand Funk Railroad's "Sin's A Good Man's Brother", whose new guise takes on scorching shades. The album's signature track is almost certainly the long closer "Ozium": a visionary trip driven by an explosion of fiery guitars that build to a crescendo spilling over into a bacchanal of distortion, backed by intense, driving drums, while celestial effects, bluesy refrains and corrosive keyboards provide the accompaniment. The glue holding it all together lies in the lyrics, where the theme of the desert looms as large as that of science fiction (Wyndorf is a devotee of sci-fi stories and superhero comics), decisive influences on the band's lyrics and attitude. Hawkwind's imprint means the atmospheres lean mostly toward the spatial and the ethereal, generating an almost metaphysical approach within this landscape of sand, rocks and melancholy sunsets.

A few months later came Tab, which the band presented as an Ep despite running as long as a full-length (56 minutes) and which, incidentally, had actually been recorded earlier and left in a drawer until then. It's a work entirely devoted to the band's psych, acid and space-rock influences, with long cosmic-trip instrumental jams (a testament to the lengthy sessions the band indulged in during their younger days) paired with acoustic digressions and reverb-soaked distortion. A result with hallucinogenic chills, like Grateful Dead gone feral from desert alienation, unfortunately overlooked for many years (until SPV's reissue in 2006). Around the same time, John McBain left the band and was replaced by Ed Mundell (who would later take part in various projects, including Desert Sessions alongside his friend Josh Homme). It's just one of the many line-up changes that would plague the band, albeit probably the most significant; we won't list them all one by one, both because there are too many and because, in the long run, they had little impact on Monster Magnet's music, which is almost entirely the compositional expression of one-man-band Dave Wyndorf.

1993 brought Superjudge. The guitars are as heavy, slow and distorted as ever, giving way to towering walls of distortion followed by enveloping, hypnotic notes, while the drums ride the songs with agility and intensity. The opener "Cyclops Revolution" is something of a band anthem, thanks to monolithic riffs that form a wall of sound against which the second guitar screams its feedback through the amp in a memorable solo. Wyndorf's voice is assertive, charismatic, rough yet also very persuasive, at times filtered and paired with atmospheric samples for an even more psychedelic effect.

Psychedelia is a double-edged sword for the band, a fundamental ingredient in shaping their stylistic identity, while at the same time occasionally owing a bit too much to its own sources of inspiration. The production is dirty, but hazy and enveloping. Thanks to songwriting even more mature and focused than on the debut, the result is excellent, both in terms of expressiveness and sonic exploration and in terms of plain impact. Unfortunately for the band, this is right in the middle of the grunge explosion, so their records don't achieve the sales they'd hoped for, remaining confined to the underground. Here too there are covers: Hawkwind's "Brainstorm" and Captain Beyond's "Mesmerization Eclipse". Wyndorf draws heavily on space-rock, and that remains Monster Magnet's trademark.

Superjudge stands as an emblem of the most astral, visionary strain of stoner rock.

1995 brought Dopes To Infinity, which sees the sound evolve toward an even darker, more Sabbath-esque style, with heavy, slow riffs. There's no shortage of catchier, more hard-rock moments closer to the "southern" tone of ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd, as well as the enveloping spatial atmosphere that gives the style its personal stamp. Credit also goes to the production, which makes the sound especially powerful yet enveloping, setting aside fuzz and other acid effects in favor of harder, colder distortion. Tracks like "Negasonic Teenage Warhead" (which would become famous years later for lending its name to a Marvel character) nod to Cream's "Tales Of Brave Ulysses".

It's an album that simultaneously showcases the project's creative potential – thanks to sturdy songwriting and an outstanding run of songs – while also foreshadowing Monster Magnet's limitations: having found a solid basic formula, they would never stray from it again; in some cases, as we'll see shortly, they would even simplify it, making it more palatable to a mass audience, and it could be said that whatever was essential and seminal the band had to say ends here. That said, Monster Magnet would go on to release a string of genre albums that would prove, on average, honest and solid.

Wyndorf and co. would from time to time play with their main influences (alternating between more psychedelic moments, more hard-rock moments, more garage/noisy moments), but without ever venturing further. By contrast, Kyuss had already, in those years, reinvented stoner rock by coining a sui generis style some critics would call "desert rock", breaking more decisively free of direct influences from 60s bands; their successors Queens Of The Stone Age would initially do the same, reinventing themselves entirely. But none of this detracts from the quality Monster Magnet brought to the stoner scene, masters of songwriting and a reference point for later generations of bands in the genre, starting with outfits that would themselves become influential, like Fu Manchu (formed around the same time but who wouldn't release their debut Lp until much later) or Acid King.

Their first taste of mainstream success came in 1998 with Powertrip, which even went gold in the United States. It's a thoroughly successful album in terms of song impact, but less original and less finely crafted than its predecessors. Purging most of the acid, spacey influences and much of the old effects arsenal, the band pairs a more direct approach with a cleaner production. It's still stoner rock at its roots, but decidedly more open to the hard rock, rock'n'roll and garage of MC5 and Stooges. There's a greater presence of catchy melodies, riffs built on punchy power-chords, hummable choruses, and sharp, catchy solos. The best moments are without doubt those that retain the strongest ties to earlier records, or rather those that find a meeting point between the band's more psychedelic soul and the album's more crowd-pleasing tendencies (in particular, the single "Space Lord", but also worth mentioning are the lysergic "Bummer" and the Kyuss-like "Atomic Clock").

The change also happens on a thematic level: Wyndorf wrote the album's songs after renting a mega-hotel in Las Vegas, and his lyrics deal mostly with gambling, naked women, ruin, vice, and how easily one can fall from grace ("Some people go to bed with Lucifer/ Then they cry when they don't greet the day with God", as Wyndorf puts it). One of the more introspective tracks is probably "See You In Hell", with Doors-style organ and Aerosmith-style vocal lines, written after being inspired by an encounter with a hippie on a bus: the unlikely freak reportedly told Wyndorf that his wife had accidentally killed their child, who was then buried in a swamp. "I was in shock and ran off the bus to write the song, which turned into a 60s horror story", the frontman later recalled. But the album's lyrical masterpiece is "Baby Gotterdamerung", a bleak, rarefied and disarming portrait of human loneliness.

Overall, Wyndorf tries to exorcise his own demons, playing at blending catchiness and desolation, sonic lightheartedness and perversion, radio-friendly form and bluesy substance.

The battle with one’s inner demons is the most personal fight any of us can undertake.

The following God Says No (2000) instead turned out to be a major commercial flop.

The band's style has now evolved into a hard rock largely modeled on Black Sabbath, sometimes more lighthearted, like a radio-friendly version of blues-rock, other times more tortured and monolithic. The album keeps ties to stoner-rock through its mighty riffing and a handful of more "classic" tracks. In the end, the result isn't among the band's most inspired or personal efforts, but overall it's far from poor — in fact, taken song by song, it manages to be both fun and varied.

It's certainly a more honest record than many releases from this period that were big in the United States (a wave of post-grunge and nu-metal bands that were practically photocopies of each other), even if a bit long-winded. The poor sales are therefore not so much down to the band's songwriting as to the fact that audiences, in an era when the rock charts were dominated by other genres, simply didn't warm to this sound and perceived it as "old". That's what sealed its fate, after the fleeting success of Powertrip.

It takes 4 years of waiting and yet another lineup change before Monster Magnet return to the studio, in 2004, with Monolithic Baby!, an album stylistically in line with its predecessor but noticeably livelier and more engaging.

The style has morphed into a breezy, punchy heavy-rock, very simple and direct, even a bit brash and rowdy. The result is very good, with a string of irresistible hits driven by Wyndorf's unshakeable charisma, and very few fillers.

"The Right Stuff" is carefree heavy-metal, while the opener "Slut Machine" is a heart-pounding slab of hard-rock. The band's image, both in their promo videos and live shows, almost reads like a parody of the reckless sex-drugs-and-rock'n'roll musician lifestyle, surrounded by buxom naked women while behind the wheel of powerful cars.

In truth, "parody" isn't far off the mark, since Wyndorf adopts a very self-mocking, witty attitude, never taking himself too seriously. The album includes covers of Robert Calvert ("The Right Stuff"), Ken Baker ("There's No Way Out Of Here") and, on the limited edition, Velvet Underground ("Venus In Furs"). In our view, the album's signature track is the anthemic single "Unbroken (Hotel Baby)", hugely melodic, carefree and powerful, alongside the near-title track "Monolithic", which is closest to the band's past, following the devastating psych-blues of "Ultimate Everything". The weakest cut, on the other hand, is the rather trite power ballad "There's No Way Out Of Here".

The album performs well in Northern Europe, but fails to take off in the United States.

In 2006 Dave Wyndorf ended up in hospital due to an overdose of anti-anxiety medication, which had been prescribed to him but which he hadn't taken as directed.

The experience left a deep mark on him, to the point of changing his views on drugs (from then on he would say he no longer considered them a source of musical and creative inspiration). As soon as he was discharged, he threw himself headlong into the recording studio to make 4-Way Diablo ("the least planned record of my career," he would later say).

It's undoubtedly a spontaneous album, thematically very inspired, alternating between anguish and pain over the ordeal he'd just been through, but also greater confidence about the future. Stylistically it retains a certain radio-friendly appeal, but wedded to a light, airy psych-rock that alternates more distorted passages with more acoustic ones. You can feel the genuineness of the songwriting, which flows like a stream of consciousness, but the result is uneven and the excessive runtime keeps the album from truly taking off.

It's a transitional album, in which Wyndorf freely expresses whatever was inspiring him at the moment, without worrying too much about organizing, shaping or polishing it.

The return of the band's more psychedelic side is explored further three years later with Mastermind, which leans decidedly toward the band's early days, at times pushing the psychedelia to extremes especially in the lyrics, which come across as particularly schizoid and visionary, also reviving their passion for science fiction, but without giving up catchy moments (amid granite-hard riffs and tribal percussion). Overall it's an enjoyable record, and the revival of their early sound can be called a success, but there's also an undeniable lack of surprises, as well as a certain compositional fatigue in some tracks, which sound like B-sides from earlier albums.

In 2010 Ed Mundell also left a band in which, for some time, Wyndorf had remained the only permanent member and sole songwriter.

In 2013 Last Patrol came out. Essentially, it sounds like Hawkwind updated to the lyrical sensibility of the new millennium. This time, the sounds, effects and production loudly proclaim not just a return to the band's origins, but to the 1960s itself. Wyndorf seems to have wanted to time-travel through the songwriting and arrangements, and in doing so he's remarkably at ease and sincere, as if he'd actually lived through that decade himself.

For these reasons, the record is indeed derivative, but far more mature, distinctive (and enjoyable) than many far-less-spontaneous revivalists. It's striking to see Wyndorf in such good form despite his age, just as comfortable in the more full-blooded tracks as in the more acoustic ones (like "The Duke"), at a time when many of his peers have either retired or struggle much harder to put out decent music.

After 30 years fronting Monster Magnet, Wyndorf released his latest album in 2018 with Mindfucker. It's once again a journey into the past, this time paying tribute above all to the Detroit rock scene. All in all it doesn't shine for originality and the sound is fairly predictable, but nothing else was to be expected; that doesn't mean, though, that several tracks don't turn out well. The opener, for instance, is a frantic number like "Rocket Freak", which sounds like it could have come straight from the repertoire of the Ramones. Overall, what stands out is the hard & heavy attitude of the Monster Magnet sound: the tracks are built on a formulaic but catchy garage-rock, interspersed with small openings toward the band's heavier, more psych-inclined soul and touches of more '70s-style punk-rock. The more spacey, psychedelic side, on the other hand, fades slightly: the reference point leans more toward Mc5 than Hawkwind, though without neglecting the latter. The lyrics are sardonic, sharp, inspired: Wyndorf puts down on paper his impressions of the social situation of the last five years, resulting in some very catchy choruses. Despite his age, the vocal performance is also decent.

This is undoubtedly an album for fans, perhaps better suited to the live setting, and unable to say anything that hasn't already been said before. And yet it's genuine, spontaneous. And from a veteran musician like Wyndorf, after all, you can't really expect much more. In any case, his contribution to the development of the stoner-rock scene will endure, with a handful of top-tier classics that marked its birth and that still stand today as key points of reference for countless bands.

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