Kyuss

At a time when the Seattle scene is literally catapulting a whole slice of alternative rock to the top of charts worldwide, the quartet from Palm Desert, a small town in Southern California swallowed by the desert, gives us "Blues For The Red Sun", a genuine earthquake, one of the most brutal and, at the same time, hypnotic records ever born. This record, however, seems to have nothing to do with conventional hard-rock or metal, nor with the sound of the Seattle bands closest to those styles (early Soundgarden and Alice in Chains above all). Kyuss, in fact, draw heavily on the past, starting with the sound itself, entirely borrowed from seventies tradition: strictly valve-driven gear, Ludwig drums, and a relentless pursuit of the "dirtiest" possible tone.

Contrary to what one might reasonably expect, though, the result is nothing even close to a mere revivalist exercise. In the Kyuss sound, one of the heaviest ways rock has ever been played merges with a psychedelic sensibility that clearly springs from the desert where the band members grew up (the album title itself is a manifesto in this regard). The result is what critics have dubbed "stoner rock".

The album's incipit makes it immediately clear what's in store: "Thumb" opens with a slow, hypnotic guitar riff, backed by rattles and an indefinably murky bass drone that builds tension right from the start. Then, suddenly, like a seismic jolt, a wall of sound crashes down on us. And what a sound: it's as if you can hear the bleeding valves of Homme and Oliveri's amplifiers screaming, not to mention Bjork's drumming, one of the very few in rock history to come close to the sheer heaviness of John Bonham's playing. Finally, John Garcia's voice enters the picture, rough, powerful, angry, at times almost desperate: it seems tailor-made to complete the band's sound.

The track barely has time to end before the guitar riff of "Green Machine" kicks in, simple and direct. Two rounds and that's it: once again the Kyuss sonic earthquake, dominated by low frequencies, is hurled at us, this time at twice the speed. "Green Machine" also gives us one of the most "catchy" choruses on the record, if such a word is even allowed when talking about "Blues For The Red Sun".

"Molten Universe", an instrumental track, opens with a slow, swaying guitar line drenched in vibrato, accompanied by a few sporadic cymbal hits from Bjork. But the (slightly lysergic) calm doesn't last long: two unison hits of toms and bass, seemingly straight from the underworld, announce that it's over. The band's brutality is this time made even more evident by a slow tempo, which is soon doubled and turned more acidic, right up to a dry, no-frills ending.

"50 Million Year Trip", after a long instrumental intro, brings back Garcia's aggressive voice sounding even angrier, despite a track played in a perhaps slightly more "relaxed" fashion, one that also gives us a long finale that's decidedly more psychedelic than heavy.

It's Garcia's abrasive voice, backed by bass and guitar, that kicks off "Thong Song": "I don't need a seance I don't read grey lines I signed it away way long I hate, slow songs". So begins an infernal game of alternation between brief, almost purely sung verses and passages of sheer violence. The track builds tension at just the right pace, before resolving into the thunderous final chorus, which repeats itself until it collapses from exhaustion, imploding under its own weight in a noisy coda that leads, without a breath, straight into the intro of "Apothecaries' Weight" — almost an instrumental ballad by comparison with the rest of the record: a track in which the band's more melancholy streak comes through most clearly, though it still closes with a crescendo that makes the sound increasingly saturated and filthy. "Caterpillar March" is another brief instrumental chapter on the album, while "Freedom Run" has the incipit that best highlights the band's desert-branded psychedelia (it almost sounds like Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia and Syd Barrett meeting in some imaginary world of trips), before detonating into a riff à la Black Sabbath (a band that certainly had a certain influence on Kyuss), where, by comparison, Ozzy Osbourne and co. end up sounding like mere Beatles epigones.

The delirium seems to take over more and more as the album's tracks unfold, with the density of the sound — still very much present — making room for airier elements that conjure endless open spaces and a scorching sun beating down on your head, as in the brief "800", which serves to introduce the following "Writhe", where Garcia's voice suddenly turns softer, becoming almost melancholy and disillusioned in the chorus. In "Capsized", another very short instrumental piece, acoustic guitars even make an appearance, conjuring images of burning sand and rattlesnakes. Then it starts up again. "Allen's Wrench" brings back Kyuss's most brutal sound, as does the hallucinated "Mondo Generator" (the only track written by Oliveri, who, incidentally, would take the name for his own band from this very song's title once he left Kyuss), where the four musicians give free rein to their psychedelic streak. "Yeah" (no track was ever more onomatopoeic) closes the record.

"Blues For The Red Sun", besides being first and foremost an inspired record that oozes intense emotion, also had the not-insignificant merit of giving an energetic jolt to the world of hard rock, alternative or otherwise — even if, paradoxically, to do so it had to dig deep into the past (Jimi Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Blue Cheer, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, just to name a few examples that easily come to mind while listening to Kyuss), dressing up a genre (metal) that was, all things considered, still relatively young — but which, barring a few sporadic exceptions, risked running aground on itself — in old clothes. The result of such an operation is music that isn't easy to define strictly as either metal or hard rock. Even the "stoner" label doesn't seem to be all that effective in this regard, especially considering the other bands usually cited as belonging to that genre, all stylistically quite distant from Kyuss (Spiritual Beggars, Fu Manchu, Monster Magnet, Electric Wizard…).

The truth, in this writer's opinion, is that the Palm Desert band simply conceived a one-of-a-kind record (in fairness, the two following albums — "Welcome To Sky Valley" and "…And The Circus Leaves Town" — would also deserve, as parts of a single trilogy, to be brought into the discussion), beyond any categorization, and that, like all great works, it ultimately contains that certain something extra that can never be fully grasped (or rather: understood), not even with the most thorough and in-depth analysis. In short: "Blues For The Red Sun" can simply be considered one of the finest records of the '90s.

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01/11/2006