The eMusic Dozen: Stoner Rock

Laurie S., the axe-wrangler and singer for Acid King, does it really slow. Rescued from the rubble of Man's Ruin, Busse Woods furnishes the band's drawn-out, doomy jam under her ghostly moaning mumble. Deliberate is an apt description for everything Acid King does, even a pour-the-molasses version of Lemmy Kilmister's "Motorhead." There’s a tune about being part of a biker nation, pounding steadily down a muddy road — it's the high point of this set, which also features an art band-like performance of BTO's "Not Fragile." If you really want to get a grip on what Acid King does, recall the part in A Fish Called Wanda where the criminal, played by Kevin Kline, is slowly run over and pressed into a plot of wet cement by a bulldozer. On Busse Woods, Acid King drives the bulldozer.

Trampled Under Hoof puts together the best Goatsnake performances in the short form, accentuating the band's superb interpretations of songs by Saint Virus and Black Oak Arkansas. Singer Pete Stahl (formerly of DC hardcore mainstays Scream) is at his most lugubrious on Vitus' "Burial at Sea," a number that Scott Reagher’s wail originally turned into a classic of stoner rock. Turning the mood completely around, Stahl electrocutes for BOA's "Hot Rod," delivering an on-fire Jim Dandy Mangrum tempered with Howlin' Wolf. The rest of the EP comes down squarely in the early heavy metal of 1970-72, thumping and rumbling riff-rock driven by the bummed-out blooz of white boys.

Fresh out of Saint Vitus, Wino Weinrich revived the name of his old D.C. metal band — the Obsessed — and scored a deal with Columbia Records, delivering The Church Within. (It flopped, but not without upholding the Vitus tradition with major label production.) Incarnate collects a bunch of good Obsessed odds 'n' ends serving the same lowdown melodic heaviness Weinrich would continue in Spirit Caravan. Indeed, sonically, the Obsessed and Spirit Caravan were virtually the same band, the guitar as a bass fiddle and Weinrich's misunderstood-man-in-a-wretched-place shtick intact for both. Incarnate's best performance is "Inside Looking Out," a faithful revivification of Grand Funk Railroad's thud rock filtering of an Eric Burdon song.

They come off like clowns in fanzine interviews, but on record Oakland's Drunk Horse are anything but. The band has the best two-guitar attack in the genre, infernally precise in its recreation of crunching harmonization. The first half of "In Tongues" has much of the thick woody guitar tone of early ZZ Top. Listen close and you'll swear there's a blasting classic rock single embedded in the bunch if only the singer would take some vocal lessons. But "Skydog" is the real reason to pay attention. Departing from the rest of the record's style, it soars and roars off into flashy hard jazz fusion, tapping into sounds from Jeff Beck/Jan Hammer collaborations and Return to Forever's Romantic Warrior. For crying out loud, the band even worked an angry and whirring synthesizer, or an axe that sounds like one else, into the no-holds-barred jam.

Novadriver initially took a great deal from Hawkwind. Space rock was the place, somewhere the act could show its unqualified love for phasing, flanging and anything whooshing. Then it occurred to the band members that writing some actual some rock & roll songs would be a good idea. The best ones they wrote are on Deeper High, peaking with "Turn to Stone," a chunk of hook-laden stripper-pole raunch taken over the top by a belting cowbell. "Roll You" is a brief venture into barroom bikerland, the type of tune Dirty Dan Buck of the Boyzz (What? You don't recall Dirty Dan?) would have been comfortable performing on the set of a movie like The Glory Stompers while having a chain fight with some of the extras. Longer compositions still pack the swirling fogs of astronomy domine and orgone accumulators, the album closing with the feedback dyad of "Blackout/Whiteout." It's fuckin’ artistic.

Twenty years ago, Dixie Witch might have had success in the arenas. Into the Sun comes down on the well-muscled side of southern rock, equivalent to the work of the Blackfoots, Hydras and Axes — in other words, the bands that didn't score any radio play and hardly anyone knows about anymore. For a band associated with the stoner movement, Dixie Witch have very little, if any, Black Sabbath in them. Instead the singer sounds like the poor man's Joe Walsh, a skill used to great advantage on "The Bomber," an old James Gang number that even goes so far as to include the original pastoral middle guitar excursion separating the tune's primary riffs. Boogie fills and breaks juice up Dixie Witch's heavy rock & roll, the title cut breaking into an accelerating tromp before it careens over the finish line. We hope Bill and Geezer will remember, Southern man don't need them around, anyhow.

On an earlier album, Men of Porn had a tune called "Smoking Pot on a Sunday Afternoon While UFO's Drone Overhead" — truth in advertising for Experiments in Feedback, which opens with 12 minutes of affected and woozy slide guitar wending its way through a cover of Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days.” It's mesmerizing and the vocals are left off, a fine strategy, since no one in the band can even croak acceptably. Men of Porn work best when there's not someone who sounds like he gargles regularly with rubbing alcohol at the mic. A grungey rager follows, "Capp Street," about a hooker stroll and three versions of the same Motorhead song, done slow, slower and slowest, achieving nirvana in a manner similar to Acid King. Yes, Porn are the equivalent of a stoner noise band, one that still manages to rock more than half the time, better odds than flipping coins. Hit the reject button before "Loop" starts unless you want background feedback to bundle garbage to or something.

Cathedral combines doom grind, early '70s obscurity — think Bang's first album for acid-burned bikers — and stoner rock. The Ethereal Mirror is the band's best album, originally appearing on Columbia and given a big-league production that burnished its power. Producer Dave Bianco glued Cathedral's great Stygian riffs, pounding drums and the imprecations of singer Lee Dorrian into a fuzzed block of classic heavy metal. Dorrian sounds like a spitting cobra curled on a rock, drawing the listener in before squirting venom — groove to the "Oh, yeaaahhhs" — in the eyes. "Midnight Mountain" is the best galloping hard metal tune in all of stonerdom. Essentially, Ethereal Mirror isn't bound into any strict style. When you put it on ten years from now it will sound as fresh as today's download.

A tummler was a Borscht Belt resort entertainer whose job it was to inspire guests into joining the festivities. Did Tummler play the equivalent of stoner Borscht Belt shows? Perhaps they did because the riffs on "Early Man" are lively enough to make you jump around even though the singing is deadly. Hard to find within the genre, "Arlo" has a terrific quick groove and because Tummler's vocalist obviously knew not every listener would cotton to his learned-to-sing-at-a-pig-calling-competition style, he leaves it off the churning instrumental, "Here's To Your Destruction." For the close, the band delivers a revved-up cover of Saint Vitus' "War Is Our Destiny." Listen close near the climax as the vocal goes ebulliently awry, actually adding to the excitement, like the joy of singing from the shower.