![]() ![]() The exuberant freedom expressed by the band whether it’s a ten minute, two chord ramble tamble, or laying into feedback and chimes like it’s a sauna, it inspires pride and courage. Where the band jams remains the land of the sunset. Sounds like Crazy Horse covering Popul Vuh. Here are some descriptive review excerpts of from an essay* on the album: Inspired by frequent LSD use, the record features a wide range of musical styles that might all fit under the umbrella terms of “groovy’’ and “out there”, constantly shifting between stretches of coherent rhythmic groove and structural collapse. “On a Micro Diet” (Listening House) is the band’s first new release since the “dark witted and heavy lidded eco blues”* of 2017’s ‘MYSTIC-100’S’ (Dom America)Īt 75 minutes, “Micro Diet” is a lofty collection of music. The current line up is a sextet featuring Alex Coxen (guitar vocals), Dave Harris (guitar), Charles Waring (bass), Abby Dahlquist (piano/synthesizer), Joe Rutter & Travis Coster (percussion) The band first gained worldwide notoriety with their self-released debut “Beyond Living” in 2010, and since then have enjoyed critical acclaim and a steady cult following, despite being notoriously hard to find information about, and seldom seen performing live since 2013. Wholesale inquiries contact Fantastique HQ: 100’S, formally known as MILK MUSICĪre an underground psychedelic rock group from Washington State. I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing this band up close for a number of years now and I can authoritatively attest that while every show is different, when the SMB is running down a steep hill at full speed (as on these takes), they become a single leaderless vibrating sonic tornado, possibly beyond the control and logic of the players themselves, picking up listeners along the way and taking them along for the ride straight into a solar furnace of sound.Physical 2xLP available 3/31/23 on Listening House via ![]() In contrast to the expansive but meticulously detailed guitar arrangements of his recordings, here Forsyth’s unhinged live guitar sound positively roars with a barely restrained vocal intensity, from liquid melodic lines to gnarled blasts of free jazz scree, to pulsating lead/rhythm vamping. This is music beyond the notes it is an expression of pure electric ecstasy, a simultaneous negation and celebration of rock music’s (indeed all musics’) essential energy. ![]() At one point late in the “Dreaming” jam, Forsyth unplugs the jack from his guitar, dragging it across the strings and lashing the body of his single-pickup “parts" Esquire, producing a desiccated barrage of percussive static. The telepathically dynamic interplay of the trio explodes with whiplash intensity across the 15-plus minute takes of “Dreaming In The Non-Dream” and “The First 10 Minutes of Cocksucker Blues,” each song’s structure serving as a framework for extended lava flows of energy. Kerlin’s gymnastically propulsive bass playing locks in with Robira’s relentless thud, each serving as counterpoint to some of the most blistering guitar work of Forsyth’s career. While the covers establish Forsyth’s basis, serving as an homage to Young and the quest for self-realization, the long tracks’ jams showcase the trance-inducing power of the Solar Motel Band as a performing entity. The four tracks included here comprise material culled from (at the time) the two most recent Solar Motel Band records DREAMING IN THE NON-DREAM (No Quarter, 2017) and THE RARITY OF EXPERIENCE (No Quarter, 2016) plus covers of two Neil Young songs - the autobiographical plaint “Don’t Be Denied,” lyrically relocated by Forsyth from Young's Canada and Hollywood to the more personally relevant geography of New Jersey and Philadelphia, and encore “Barstool Blues” (they’d run out of material to play, so another Neil Young tune it was). These recordings reveal a band that is clearly in high spirits and high gear, operating with an expansive, improvisatory fleetness that allows them to stretch the material to almost ludicrous extremes and then let it to snap back to some semblance of form while somehow seemingly never wasting a note, a beat, a gesture. Highlights of that show are included in this live release, RARE DREAMS: SOLAR LIVE 2.27.18, recorded before a packed house seated mere feet from the band’s amplifiers. On February 27, 2018, Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band (comprised, in this iteration, of long-time SMB bassist Peter Kerlin and Kerlin’s Sunwatchers battery mate Jason Robira on drums) were close to wrapping up an 18-date tour of the EU and UK with a two-set, one hour and 45 minute show at Cafe OTO, London’s premier venue for adventurous music. ![]()
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