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Brant Bjork And The Low Desert Punk Band - Black Flower Power

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    Ian Jane
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  • Brant Bjork And The Low Desert Punk Band - Black Flower Power



    Brant Bjork And The Low Desert Punk Band - Black Flower Power
    Released by: Napalm Records
    Released on: November 14th, 2014.
    Purchase From Amazon

    Brant Bjork, the man who founded and played drums for Kyuss and who played with Fu Manchu, is back with his latest band, Brant Bjork And The Low Desert Punk Band and if you've dug his previous efforts, odds are pretty good that you're going to be into this one too. This time Bjork is handling vocals and guitar work with Tony Tornay on drums, Dave Dinsmore on bass and Bubba DuPree also handling guitar duties.

    The track listing for this album is as follows:

    Controllers Destroyed / We Don't Serve Their Kind / Stokely Up Now / Buddha Time (Everything Fine) / Soldier Of Love / Boogie Woogie On Your Brain / Ain't No Runnin' / That's A Fact Jack / Hustler's Blues / Where You From Man

    Right from the opening track, Controllers Destroyed, we get that stoner rock sound all fucked up and fuzzed out with some trippy soloing overtop of pounding, incredibly stoic and rhythmic drumming. It's a great way to start off the album and that giant pot leaf that adorns its cover, well, its significance becomes obvious. There are blues and doom influences aplenty here and the influence of the mighty Black Sabbath is hard to miss.

    Track two, We Don't Serve Their Kind, is more fuzzy, distorted riffing with Bjork's surprisingly clear, concise and audible vocals layered over top. This isn't as fast or as heavy as the first song but it's slick and catchy and at the half way mark there's a guitar solo so psychedelic that it'll make your head spin. Stokely Up Now is a blues track filtered through a whole lot of second hand pot smoke, it's pretty sludgy but layered really well, the vocals don't get lost and the guitar work remains intricate in its simplicity, until about three quarters of the way through where it just breaks down into a sort of thrashy, bluesy noisy mess of awesome.

    Buddha Time keeps that bluesy thing going nicely, it's repetitive to the point where you can anticipate where it's going to go even hearing it for the first time, but that just makes it easy to get into. It's the shortest track on the album but it works. Soldier Of Love marks the half way point on this strange, cloudy journey and it slows things down a bit, almost too much. It's not a bad track by any stretch, the playing is solid and the vocals are good but it doesn't quite make you want to move the way the four songs prior do. Boogie Woogie On Your Brain, however, is a big return to fuzzy, hazy, smoky form. It starts off with a big, beautiful wall of sound and keeps up that level of intensity for its three and a half minute long running time. There's a weird high pitched chord they hit on the guitar here that basically launches you into space every time they hit it. Things continue on an upward swing with Ain't No Runnin', more bluesy/stoner riffage that'll get you moving along to it in no time.
    As things move towards the finish line, track eight, That's A Fact Jack, busts out the wah-wah pedal a little bit for the intro before the heavy flows over you. It goes back and forth a bit, with some quirky picking in a psychedelic style moves over the main riff. The vocals come into the mix and it just gets weirder and heavier from there as it toys with your expectations. Hustler's Blues is, not surprisingly, a blues based track. It starts off very slowly, with a minimalist guitar riff over top of some smooth drumming. It stays very slow and even tempered, deliberately paced and really only getting loud and heavy in the last minute or so to sort of drive home a musical point. It builds towards a crescendo of sorts that involves the liberal doses of fuzz you'd expect from Bjork and company at this point.

    The eight minute plus Where You From Man ends things on a note best described as… out there. For the first half a minute or so it's a Sabbath inspired doom riffer but it goes into the outer reaches of the galaxy from there with distortion and fuzz pedals handed out in equal doses and trippy, wild sounding vocals layered over top. Mixed in with Bjork's vocals are some odd samples, from where I do not know, that only serve to max out the weird factor that this final track has got going in spades. It's a great send off to an album that should definitely appeal to Bjork's fan base. As always, there's a bit of experimentation in his work here but not so much that it doesn't sound like a Brant Bjork album, making this ten track release a great mix of the expected and the unexpected alike.



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