Kyuss

Beyond these streets, around these streets, there was the desert waiting for the city to die so it could cover it once more with its timeless sand. I was overwhelmed by an awareness of man's pathetic fate, of the terrible meaning of his presence. The desert was there like a patient white animal, waiting for men to die and civilizations to flicker out like little flames, before going out completely. I sensed then the courage of humanity, and I was glad to be part of it. The evil of the world was no longer such, but became in my eyes an indispensable means of keeping the desert at bay.

So wrote John Fante in a passage from what is probably his most celebrated work, "Ask the Dust". For Fante the desert is a metaphor for oppression, the cosmic void that tears apart man's vain ambitions and obsessions. It is death ineluctably seeping into life itself, even before breaking it in the physiological sense. Thus, the Mojave Desert becomes the sanctuary from which the requiem for the American dream rises, swallowing up the artificial lights of nearby Los Angeles.

The desert, where bare earth and sky touch without intercession, has always been in literature a place/non-place laden with allegorical symbolism. The quintessential mystical and metaphysical retreat, and therefore a testing ground for encountering what lies beyond and transcends the materiality of life — namely, death (not necessarily steeped in a pessimistic, despairing vision as in Fante or even Buzzati, but understood more as a relationship with the infinite).

In music and the visual arts, the inspiration of the desert has often translated into aesthetic forms clearly belonging to the realm of psychedelia. But where, in the 60s and 70s, the beat generation filled the arid expanses with flowers and colors born of acid trips, and directors like Jodorowsky ("El Topo") and Antonioni ("Zabriskie Point") turned it into surrealist and existentialist theatre respectively, it was only at the start of the 90s that the desert was brought into music in its rawest essence, with all its impact of dust.

Starting from Los Angeles, heading in the opposite direction from the one leading to Fante's beloved Mojave, you arrive at Palm Desert, on the edge of the Coachella Valley. This is the land that gave birth to what is commonly known as stoner rock (or stoner metal, as some prefer to call it). An entire music scene was born on the backbone of just two bands: Kyuss and Fu Manchu, both hailing from the Palm Desert area. Indeed, most of the most popular stoner acts spring from the ribs of these two bands (Unida, Hermano, Slo Burn, Nebula, right up to — not by chance — the world-famous Queens Of The Stone Age).

Stoner created an unusual and far from trivial alchemy between seemingly distant styles. Its main reference point was the early metal of the Black Sabbath school (in particular, the "Paranoid" era) and the early days of Blue Cheer. This was combined with the slipperiest blues veins and the lysergic digressions of psych-rock, all blended into a modern approach that shared sonic affinities with the nascent doom strand developing in parallel during those years (which reached its peak a few years later with the arrival of Electric Wizard), while remaining far removed from it in terms of lyrical themes.

Where Fu Manchu displayed a style more indebted to hardcore punk, and — on the East Coast, in New Jersey — Monster Magnet bastardized and weighted down the space rock lesson of Hawkwind, Kyuss managed to plant the genre's boundary markers firmly and permanently.

The release of "Blues For The Red Sun" in 1992 marked a pivotal moment for the entire heavy scene of the 90s, which in a sense was forced to rethink its paradigms. Incandescent, incisive, raw, and yet hypnotic and cerebral, "Blues For The Red Sun" stood as an absolute manifesto for a new way of understanding "heavy" music, resurrecting the schemes and sounds of a past that seemed buried and presenting them anew in a form perfectly suited to its time.

Despite this, and despite the epic aura that has (rightly) been woven around “Blues For The Red Sun”, Kyuss reached their true artistic zenith with the follow-up, “Welcome To Sky Valley”. If “Blues For The Red Sun” is chiefly valuable as a break from the evolution of heavy rock and metal in those years (thus standing as a cornerstone of the genre), “Welcome To Sky Valley” brings that warlike vocation to full fruition, perfecting and, in a sense, “refining” (though that term can be misleading) the formula Kyuss had adopted.

Meanwhile, the band had been signed to a major label (Elektra), at a time when distorted guitars had once again taken center stage and Kyuss had become a hot name, despite their obvious distance from the standards of the mainstream movement of the day (grunge and the like).

“Welcome To Sky Valley” continues the path laid down with “Blues For The Red Sun” (later rounded off by “…And The Circus Leaves Town”, the final chapter of a kind of trilogy before the band's split, which was followed, among other things, by Josh Homme forming Queens Of The Stone Age).

What emerges most forcefully from “Welcome To Sky Valley” is, above all, its contrasts. The brutality of “Blues For The Red Sun” remains intact, but the atmospheres grow more ethereal and submerged. The granite riffs dissolve into a caustic, impenetrable whirlwind. The overall mood turns surreal and dreamlike, though in the way only the most disorienting of nightmares can be.

Conceptually, the record shows greater maturity and artistic self-awareness, structured in a modular fashion that divides its flow into three suites, each made up of three or four tracks.

The opening notes of “Gardenia” immediately sound like a statement of intent: the initial riff rises like a monolith, losing itself in a smoky, chaotic yet rigorous distortion, which comes to a head in an acid psych interlude before the final onslaught. “Asteroid” weaves apocalyptic textures, exploding and then settling into a guitar refrain that has the flavour of an Eastern chant transplanted into the Southern California desert, interspersed with a feedback-and-laser digression that, for a minute, can sound like a stripped-down “Interstellar Overdrive” travelling down California 111 aboard a rickety van rather than a spaceship.

The following “Supa Scoopa Mighty Scoop” and “100°”, along with “Conan Troutman” further down the tracklist, pick up the pace, while “Space Cadet” and “Demon Cleaner” stand out as peculiar episodes. The former is a perverse, slithering blues dirge accompanied by muted vocalizing, while the latter edges toward a certain rock mannerism with a vaguely grunge flavour typical of the era. “N.O.” is a riot of tempo shifts and dueling, vitriolic guitars, while “Odissey” frames an inhuman fury between an intro and a bridge of arabesque patterns dancing within an endless phaser loop. “Whitewater” closes the circle with a long coda of instrumental phrasing that fades away on the horizon, like a sunset over the dunes.

If “Blues For The Red Sun” represents the more animalistic, instinctive side of Kyuss and (as we said) the manifesto of both the band and the genre as a whole, “Welcome To Sky Valley” is its monument. More broadly, we can call it the creative and innovative peak of Kyuss, and by extension of the entire stoner underground.

The first way stoner broke from the rest of heavy music was in its use of guitars. Setting aside the Swedish death metal scene (which was quite distinctive in this regard), heavy metal had settled into a fairly precise canon, born of thrash, groove and speed tendencies: tight, precise, scooped-out guitars, typical of the sound of Dimebag Darrell and late-80s James Hetfield, with high-output pickups blasted through towering hi-gain stacks from Mesa Boogie, Peavey or Randall. Homme, by contrast, reached for rather vintage gear, centered on Ampeg and Sunn amplifiers (the legendary Model T) and an extensive use of fuzz. He sifted through Tony Iommi's venomous style, making it even more extreme and corrosive. In particular, the “wall of sound” of Spectorian memory is transformed into a stunning, dark carpet of fuzz dissipating into the air, in an exercise methodologically similar (though with very different results) to what shoegaze would later do. The guitars thus overwhelm everything else, submerging the entire mix in a constant low frequency, including Brant Bjork's drumming, which nonetheless pounds away like hell, a worthy heir to the styles of Bill Ward and John Bonham. Providing the counterpoint is John Garcia's high, vibrant vocal, which likewise draws on forefathers Osbourne and Plant, though with a more wasted, lascivious edge.

“Welcome To Sky Valley”, better than any other stoner album, carries the deepest darkness of the hard rock born twenty or twenty-five years earlier into the 1990s, and does so in a psychotropic ecstasy, in an unconscious delirium of the mind, in the most restless of REM phases.

Above all, the true protagonist of “Welcome To Sky Valley” is the desert. That murky, unfathomable desert, palpable from the title and the cover art alone, finds full soul and body in every track. At times it's a sandstorm (“Gardenia”, “Odissey”), at others a barren lunar landscape (“Asteroid”, “Space Cadet”). What's striking is that here the desert is not merely a destination for beatnik wandering and pilgrimage, not a sensory experience, not a narrative device, nor even a stage; here the desert rises to become the central pivot of the whole artistic story. A physical place before it is a metaphysical one. A poetic topos and, at the same time, a concrete geographic coordinate. A land with no messianic connotation whatsoever, yet one that has the harshness and the forgiveness of a mother; and such a narrative, spiritual and carnal in equal measure, can only be the product of a son's vision.

Homme, Garcia and Bjork were raised by the desert; their sense of it can only be different from, and more viscerally profound than, that of the wanderer searching for some sense of transcendence. There, they move first as human beings and only afterward as artists. All of this manifests powerfully in “Welcome To Sky Valley”; and precisely for this reason, here the desert is not a depiction of the infinite, nor of death. On the contrary, it is life, which however suffocating and claustrophobic, even in its immensity, still pulses.

Stoner would never enjoy much commercial fortune, with the exception of the Queens Of The Stone Age interlude, the natural evolution of the Kyuss adventure, through which Homme would find a formula better suited to the mainstream market while still maintaining high artistic standards. Nevertheless, the legacy of “Blues For The Red Sun” and “Welcome To Sky Valley” is especially important, above all as a decisive influence on the entire alternative rock and metal underground in the years that followed.

And one way or another, the desert of “Welcome To Sky Valley” has gotten into the bones of anyone who has had the courage to cross it; of anyone who sensed its life rather than keeping it at bay for fear of death.

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25/02/2026