DesertFest NYC 2019

As noted earlier, it’s not my policy to blog about literally every concert I attend, unless I feel it’s somehow noteworthy.  A three day stoner rock festival in Brooklyn, New York may well qualify.  So here goes.

I’d been meaning to see a band called Elder, from Boston, Massachusetts, which has 4 albums out.   They come off as an intriguing mix of prog and stoner, with 9-12 minute songs which jam out a little.   Finally, the opportunity came:  DesertFest NYC, to occur on April 26 (Friday) through April 28 (Sunday).  The Friday show was at the Saint Vitus Bar in northwest Brooklyn, the Saturday and Sunday shows at The Well, also in Brooklyn, close to the Montrose St. station on the L line.  It’s a large enough venue with a large outdoor area, the immediate area in front of the stage protected by a canopy.  This neighborhood is industrial, due east of Williamsburg.

Before I go further: thank you to Dave and Loni for making this adventure possible, each in their own way.  Thank you.

Anyhow.  For reasons most plausibly related to the desert jams out in California with which KYUSS is most closely related, many of these stoner rock festivals invoke “DESERT” in their name even if the locale, downtown Brooklyn, is thousands of miles away from any desert.  Like DC, the NYC area is more like a swamp than a desert.   It was never a desert and if mankind vanishes from the city letting nature retake it, things will probably be flooded and swampy until the Sun expands into a red giant billions of years from now and we’re all long gone (except for Keith Richards).     

For logistical reasons I did not catch Friday night’s lineup, in reverse order from headliner to “who the hell are these guys?”:  Black Cobra, Here Lies Man, High Tone, Son of a Bitch, Heavy Temple.  I think I have some Black Cobra CDs, vaguely recalling them as stoner rock.  The rest I don’t recognize.  In any case I wasn’t there.

Saturday & Sunday had alternate stages full of bands which I ignored. 

Saturday (again, reverse order): Windhand, Weedeater, The Skull, Danava, Electric Citizen (main stage), Steak, Mirror Queen, Worshipper, Tower (second stage).    My prime concerns were The Skull, Eric Wagner’s post-Trouble band, and Danava, who I had never seen before. 

Electric Citizen have a female singer and a worried looking lead guitarist who reminds me of William H. Macy.  They’re not bad, but not particularly memorable, and may well be doomed to perpetual opening band status.  We’ll see. 

Danava are from Portland, Oregon, and have three albums:  self-titled, UnonoU, and Hemisphere of Shadows.  They’re another band that seems to take Black Sabbath as a starting point and change it up with a modest dose of weirdness. 

The Skull gave us the same awesome riffage we might expect from Trouble, for obvious reasons.  Mr. Wagner was in high spirits and shared that energy and enthusiasm with the crowd.  I got to shake his hand twice.  I’ve seen Trouble once with him on vocals (years ago) and saw The Skull more recently at Café 611 in Frederick, Maryland.  While the big four of Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer and Anthrax got most of the attention from thrash fans back in the 80s and 90s, a few lesser known but quality thrash bands were putting out albums if you had the good fortune to know about them.  Trouble added some 60’s psychedelic vibe to distinguish themselves from the others, Manic Frustration (1992) being my favorite album.  Dave Grohl is also a big fan, and said that for him, buying Psalm 9 (the first album) was like buying Sgt. Pepper.    If you’re into Trouble, by all means check out this band, who have two albums of their own: For Those Which Are Asleep, and The Endless Road Turns Dark. 

Weedeater gave me too much of a NASCAR-METH vibe and their cover of Skynyrd’s “Gimme Back My Bullets” was unrecognizable.   Another band with decent tuneage marred by abysmal vocals, thanks to bassist/vocalist Dave “Dixie” Collins.  I have their most recent album, Goliathan, and listened to the prior four albums, all of which sound pretty much the same.  Maybe they should just follow Karma To Burn, whose songs are 80% instrumentals, though confusingly named by number.    

Having seen Windhand in DC in January, I left after Weedeater.  Like The Sword, Windhand are a band with decent enough studio material but live, seem to believe that simply getting up on stage and playing the material is sufficient.  Sadly, neither band has appreciable stage presence.   

Back again for more the next day!

Sunday’s lineup:  Elder, Monolord, ASG, Ruby the Hatchet, Fatso Jetson (main stage); Mick’s Jaguar, Duel, Green Milk From the Planet Orange, Sun Voyager (second stage).   Sun Voyager had a cool dugout/onehitter for sale, but as I had ignored all the second stage bands, and had a King Buffalo one already, I had to pass.

I missed Fatso Jetson and ignored Ruby the Hatchet, another band with a chick singer, in their case a woman who looks like a metal version of Britney Spears.  Like Electric Citizen they’re ok, just not particularly different or memorable, and may well share the same fate of perpetual opening band.  Intriguing that the promoters saw fit to put them on different days. 

ASG.  I had Survive Sunrise and Blood Drive (newest and second newest albums) both of which I liked.  When I saw them on the bill, it was another incentive to catch this show.  Lead guitarist Jonah Citty plays something I’ve never seen, a left-handed Gibson Flying V.   I can’t describe their difference from the baseline of Black Sabbath, but it was enough to discern if not to articulate.  Not bad.

Monolord.  I had seen them a few months back.  They’re from Gothenburg, Sweden, and the guitarist/singer Thomas Jager plays a Greco Flying V.   He has a BOC cross tattooed on his arm.  Slow and drudgy, a bit repetitive, you have to be in the mood for “Into the Void” or “Under the Sun” type songs.  Hell, he was tuned to C, down from E, so he had to retune between each song.   I have all their albums!  In reverse order, Rust, Vaenir, Empress Rising, and Lord of Suffering/Die in Haze. 

Elder.  Finally.  This band is led by Nick DiSalvo, who plays a weird guitar I don’t recognize – usually he’s shown playing an SG.   I had actually purchased their first album, Elder, soon after it came out, followed by Dead Roots Stirring, Lore, and now Reflections of a Floating World, but hadn’t been able to see them live until now.  They start off with a riff, then plunge into an intense jam, and come back again.  Now repeat that for the next four songs in the set….and you have Elder, who blend stoner rock with some prog and jam band elements for an alluring mix. 

Overall an excellent show, which I’m glad I made the effort to visit the NYC area again to attend.   My next out-of-the-area shows are TOOL at Hampton Coliseum in southeast Virginia, May 10, followed by the third Earth Rocker festival in northeastern West Virginia, on July 13, the main attraction being Maryland band Clutch. 

The Vest.  I’m noticing more rock fans showing up with vests adorned with patches.  Usually there’s a large back patch, the rule seeming to be that the patch size is inversely proportional to the fame and fortune of the band.  A band I like, REZN, whose recent stop at the Sidebar in downtown Baltimore was sparsely attended (fortunately myself included) is selling large back patches on its website.   I snagged two smaller patches.  In fact, I’ve accumulated enough patches to start a vest, but at this point I can’t help considering it an affectation.  I still have a denim jacket from Paris around, which dates from my high school days.  The large, central back patch on that is Black Sabbath. 

Oddly, the merchandise options at the Desertfest were fairly modest.  Bands seem to vary in how diligent they are in offering such things, ranging from the basic t-shirts all the way to things like patches – Sleep are the best at that – and grinders or onehitters, again Sleep being the best as well.  Sadly, many of us fans would gladly open our wallets and buy these things.  At the very least you would imagine a band would release tour t-shirts with the current tour’s dates on the back, but I’m seeing that to be the exception and not the rule.  Not my problem, of course, but word to the wise…..

Sweet Leaf

Yes, more s**t about stoner rock and Black Sabbath.  Here, though, I have to be critical.

By the way, a bit on why Black Sabbath serve as the inspiration for stoner rock.  Let’s look at the band’s top two competitors in the 1970s:  Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.

Deep Purple were hardly even a drinking band, and with the obvious 800 lb gorilla exception of Tommy Bolin, who OD’d on heroin a few months after Mark IV crashed and burned on their Asian tour of Come Taste the Band, wasn’t into drugs.  They don’t sing about getting drunk, high, or otherwise screwed up.

Led Zeppelin were into alcohol (Bonzo) and heroin (Page), but Plant was writing the lyrics and preferred to be pretentious and up in the clouds.  Singing about drugs was beneath his dignity.

That leaves Sabbath:  the #1 song is, of course, “Sweet Leaf”, an obvious tribute to cannabis.  “Hand of Doom” is a caution against heroin – which even Ozzy knew to avoid – whereas “Fairies Wear Boots” (also from Paranoid) refers to “tripping”, i.e. LSD use.  And they had to praise cocaine with “Snowblind”.  Add this to the doom and riffing, plus the otherworldly change-ups best seen on Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage, and you’ve got a strong recipe for a band inducing its fans to fire up a bong.   

Back to this dirtweed idiocy claiming to be a stoner rock Sabbath tribute album….

Track Listing: Into the Void (Cancer Bats); Dirty Women (Mos Generator); Changes (Bloody Hammers); The Warning (Wo Fat); The Writ (Stoned Jesus); Hole in the Sky (Scorpion Child); Hand of Doom (Death Hawks); Lady Evil (House of Broken Promises); Planet Caravan (Machuca); Sleeping Village (Witch Mountain); Electric Funeral (Solace); Solitude (Ulver); “After Forever” – in fact, Tomorrow’s Dream, you morons (Pentagram); Sweet Leaf (Weedpecker); Paranoid (Golden Void); Iron Man (William Shatner).

I got this because two bands I really like, Wo Fat and Weedpecker (do they toke?  Need you ask?  I have to wonder what Polish weed is like) are on this.   They do a decent job of it.

With one exception, they’re all Ozzy songs:  House of Broken Promises (who?) cover “Lady Evil”, hardly the best song on Heaven & Hell.  I’d have gone with “Lonely Is the Word”. 

The Death Hawks (who???) butcher “Hand of Doom” by making it into a half-assed acoustic song.  Black Sabbath have several acoustic songs.  Why ruin this one? FAIL.

I don’t know if was the producer of this album or the ever-f**ked Bobby Liebling who was responsible, but if you can’t tell “After Forever” from “Tomorrow’s Dream”, Tony Iommi should come to your house and kick you in the nuts.  Free of charge.  Having said that, the cover itself is not bad. 

I’m puzzled as to why “Sleeping Village” was put on disc two, well after “The Warning”, which it runs into on the first album.  I’m also puzzled that Witch Mountain bothered to cover it at all.  8 albums – more, if you include 13 or any of the non-Ozzy albums - and that’s the song you chose?  SMH.

Is William Shatner a stoner rock band? Lest we think that some group of non-Montreal Star Trek actors thought it would be clever to name themselves after Captain Kirk himself (or Denny Crane) it turns out that this is, in fact, Shatner himself.  He makes a decent attempt to actually SING the song, a more heroic attempt than his “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” effort, and Zakk Wylde brings the artificial harmonics we recognize from his work with the Ozzman.  Someone was probably a bit too stoned when they put this on the list.   From the rest of the mistakes I guess whoever did this doesn’t know any better.  Maybe it was a joke, but given the consistent incompetence on display here, the ignorance explanation is more plausible.

What’s funny is that by now I’ve been into stoner rock for years and bought lots of stuff from All That’s Heavy.  Yet I only recognized a few of these bands.  Moreover, stoner rock stalwarts like Fu Manchu, Nebula, Kyuss, Monster Magnet, etc. are absent.  So who put this thing together?

Then there’s the idea of a tribute album at all.  With any given song you can…

1.         Screw it up.  Why bother?  In particular, making an electric song acoustic is the easiest way to do this.  Let the band itself make this mistake.

2.         Play it verbatim.  In that case, there’s little point in doing it at all.  Then again, doing so is a way of saying the original version is the best.  

3.         Play it a little differently.  How?  Here’s your chance to either shine or crash & burn.  Choose wisely, but there is not to TRY but only to DO.  Where have we heard that before?

Before this, we had these two more mainstream (and much better) tribute albums to Black Sabbath:

Nativity in Black.  A better, A-List group.  After Forever, the actual song (Biohazard); Children of the Grave (White Zombie); Paranoid (Megadeth); Supernaut (1,000 Homo DJs); Iron Man (Ozzy w/Therapy); Lord of this World (Corrosion of Conformity); Symptom of the Universe (Sepultura); The Wizard (Bullring Brummies): Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath (Bruce Dickinson with Godspeed); N.I.B. (Ugly Kid Joe); War Pigs (Live) (Faith No More); Black Sabbath (Type O Negative).

Nativity in Black II.  A sequel, with some bands reappearing.  Sweet Leaf (Godsmack); Hole in the Sky (Machine Head); Behind the Wall of Sleep (Static X); Never Say Die (Megadeth); Snowblind (System of a Down); Electric Funeral (Pantera); N.I.B. (Primus with Ozzy Osbourne); Hand of Doom (Slayer); Under the Sun (Soulfly): Sabbra Cadabra (hed(PE)); Into the Void (Monster Magnet); Iron Man (Busta Rhymes).

Even these had some good tracks and some absolute stinkers.  The first one was mostly faithful versions with no misses.  But NIB II had some horrendous ones:  Machine Head, Static X, System of a Down, and Busta Rhymes were absolute s**t.  Dave Wyndorf screwed up "Into the Void" with a confusing ad lib about "dinosaurs in Vietnam".  I'm ambivalent about hed(PE)'s version.  The rest on that album were fine.  

Yob and Kadavar

Another two stoner rock bands worthy of note and attention.  But before I reach them, I have a few comments.

First, as I noted before, notwithstanding the label, you don’t have to smoke marijuana to enjoy stoner rock.  Plenty of non-stoners enjoy Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and the Grateful Dead.  If you can enjoy those bands without weed, you can enjoy any combination thereof.

Second, Brazil – again.  To my knowledge there are several Brazilian stoner rock bands, but as yet I haven’t heard them and can’t tell which are the Fu Manchu, Kyuss, Sleep, Saint Vitus, etc. of that country.   “This merits further study.”  When I have completed my analysis, rest assured, my loyal readers, you will hear about it.

Third.  The Portuguese word for marijuana is maconha, pronounced “mah-COIN-ya”.  In English we generally refer to marijuana smokers as being “stoned” and, refer to them as “stoners”.  Brazilians turn maconha into an adjective, maconhado (stoned – male; a stoned woman would be “maconhada”) and a noun, maconheiro (female, maconheira).  So a stoner rocker would be a metaleiro maconheiro.  A Brazilian stoner rock fan?  Metaleiro maconheiro brasileiro.  Being VERY stoned?  Maconhadão (-ão = BIG).   

Anyhow.  After awhile all those bands tend to sound the same, so when I find one that doesn’t, it’s a nice surprise.  Here are two who are sufficiently different – and different from each other.

Kadavar.  From Berlin, Germany.  This band has Christoph "Lupus" Lindemann (guitar/vocals), Christophe "Tiger" Bartelt (drums), and Simon "Dragon" Bouteloup (bass).  I have their most recent album, oddly enough titled Berlin.  It’s damn good.  Good hard rock, not too drony, and nice, airy production.  Too many bands compress the hell out of their stuff and it winds up sounding like some putrid fruit cake.  [QOTSA, please get Chris Goss back as your producer.]

 

YOB. Shamelessly ripping off Wikipedia (thanks!), YOB is a doom metal band from Eugene, Oregon: Aaron Rieseberg, Travis Foster, and Mike Scheidt. While Kadavar have shorter, snappier songs, Yob go for more an Electric Wizard style drone.  However, I was pleasantly surprised that the drone has some articulate jamming in it, instead of merely being endlessly repetitive.  The best analogy I can make is being smothered by a very dark, elaborate oriental carpet.  The melody changes up enough to avoid boring you to sleep.  I have Clearing the Path to Ascend, their newest album, four tracks between 11 and 18 minutes. 

Both bands are available on Spotify, so you have NO excuse not to get listening.  Now.  Thank you.  

Brant Bjork

I’ve been listening to a bit more of this guy lately, in particular, Gods And Goddesses and Punk Rock Guilt.   Prior to that it was Jalamanta, Saved By Magic, and Black Flower Power.

In the beginning:  there was Kyuss, famous for giving us Josh Homme, the lead dude of Queens of the Stone Age.  With that band he’s on Wretch, Blues for the Red Sun, (Welcome to) Sky Valley and ....And The Circus Leaves Town.  Since Kyuss are also famous for being one of the first stoner rock bands, and are still well esteemed to this day, that alone would give BB solid stoner rock credentials.

Then it was  Fu Manchu, for the albums, No One Rides For Free, The Action is Go, Jailbreak, Eatin’ Dust, King of the Road (their best album), and California Crossing. 

QOTSA bassist Nick Oliveiri had a falling out with Homme – who can be a bit strong-minded about running his band – so he wound up making his own band, Mondo Generator, which has two studio albums, Cocaine Rodeo and A Drug Problem That Never Existed, both of which BB is on.

Solo.  He has 7 albums as “Brant Bjork” (Jalamanta, Brant Bjork & the Operators, Keep Your Cool, Local Angel, Tres Dias [a compilation with only one unique song], Punk Rock Guilt, and Gods & Goddesses), two as “Brant Bjork and the Bros” (Saved By Magic and Somera Sol), and one with his “Low Desert Punk Band” (Black Flower Power).  The solo distinction is that with the prior bands, he was playing drums, whereas now he’s playing multiple instruments and seems to be on guitar & vocals live – basically doing a Dave Grohl/Foo Fighters switch.  I suppose you could call him the Dave Grohl of stoner rock.  What’s even funnier is that Grohl himself played drums briefly with Queens of the Stone Age and teamed up with Josh Homme and John Paul Jones (yes, the Led Zeppelin bassist/keyboardist) for Them Crooked Vultures.

Although I haven’t heard all his material, I’ve heard the Kyuss, the Fu Manchu, about 1/3 of his solo material.  It all qualifies as stoner rock, and all has a definite groove of coolness.  I’ve seen him in concert a few times, although only as a drummer: Kyuss (1995), Fu Manchu (2002), and Kyuss Lives (2011).  I’m still trying to catch him playing a tour as his solo band. 

Note: despite the term “stoner rock”, much of this music is not psychedelic at all, and Bjork’s stuff is not either.  It’s riff driven, with some bands like Bjork’s having a definite groove element to it, almost “heavy-funky”.  The scene also includes bands which are much slower and sludgier (“doom”), such as Electric Wizard and Acid King (imagine Black Sabbath’s “Into the Void” – but even slower), or others which pick up the tempo considerably with a quasi-thrash vibe, like High On Fire.  It’s not music which requires marijuana to enjoy, but many of its fans are proud tokers, and some bands even celebrate it in their names:  Bongripper, Bongzilla, Weedeater, Weedpecker, etc.  The genre seems to take Black Sabbath as its starting point, and then spliff it up with some weirdness, a la Pink Floyd, or what I call Black Floyd.  They inject just enough originality to avoid simply being de facto Black Sabbath tribute bands, but they often sound very much the same as each other. 

If you’re a fan of classic heavy metal – AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest – you’re going to find that the bands are getting older and touring less and less.  Black Sabbath will be lucky to follow up 13 with another album and tour – and Bill Ward is effectively retired.  Priest are close to shutting down.  AC/DC may have one more album and/or tour after Rock or Bust, and Maiden eked out its most recent album, Book of Souls, which still hasn’t been released (ETA 9/4/15), before Bruce Dickinson’s cancer scare.  When they do tour, it’s large venues at high prices.  The beauty of the stoner rock scene is that none of these bands have blown up huge, so they’re playing local clubs fairly often for modest prices.  There are some stoner rock festivals in Europe, but I haven’t seen one come by the DC area yet.  But the bottom line is that you get “Black Floyd” in your home town fairly often.  And you don’t even have to toke up.