Dire Wolves - Paradisiacal Mind (Feeding Tube / Cardinal Fuzz / Pome Pome Tones, 2018)

Continuing along the lysergic snail trail that was birthed last week with the Wilder Gonzales Agreda release, here we’ve landed in an American neo-psych boogie spiritualist mode with this new beast from DireWolves – who refer to themselves on this release as Dire Wolves (Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band).  The roots of this crew stretch way back into the 1990s.  Their subterranean tendrils originate both in the Darla Records sunshine pop-psych-tronica zone – Brian Lucas was a member of the should-be-legendary Mirza – and the equally ancient strange folk ways of The Iditarod, whose Jeffrey Alexander has gone on to play with Black Forest/Black Sea, Jackie-O Motherfucker and these Dire Wolves we’re speaking about.  Their tunes sail within all of these influential orbits as well as the various Kosmische rock and astral jazz landmarks that have woven their way into the contemporary psychedelic streams of thought.  It’s a sonic brew that’ll put you out, in the best way possible!

Paradisiacal Mind is a five-track epic from this San Francisco outfit, hitting all the high notes mentioned previously, and leads off with a flavorful rock-n-roll creeper called “Unfettered and Alive”.  This relatively short jam incorporates delicious stabs of violin and mysterious ghost vocals, which fog up the already misty windows and leave us hungry for what’s next.  “Just Live Your Life Behind Your Eyes” is a hazy vision, one which evades being recognized at the outset, but which eventually achieves clarity over its lengthy running time.  It’s a woven droner that takes off toward the heavens with a maddening energy.

“We Are Stardust” is a stream of proggy jazz that disappears into a cavern of acoustic guitar and bizarre field recordings.  The lysergic energy of 1970s Kosmische out-rock is smeared all over “In and Out of Den Garten He Goes”, which is a swirling, bleary-eyed maelstrom of madness that sets us up for the monumental psych rock blast of the title track.  Coming in at just over seventeen minutes, this piece is the motherlode.  It’s a folding together of all of Dire Wolves’ influences into a single, soaring epic that alone is worth the price of admission.

I highly encourage sourcing out a copy of this maddening slab of free-rock mania.  You can score yourselves the wax over at Cardinal Fuzz in the EU or at Feeding Tube in North America.  However, if your preferred flavor is digital, head on over to Bandcamp to reel in these cosmic sounds.

Prana Crafter - Enter the Stream (Cardinal Fuzz / Sunrise Ocean Bender / Eggs in Aspic, 2018)

Seattle-based Will Sol is Prana Crafter, a musician and songwriter who straddles the blurry line between psychedelic folk and kosmische drone a la Six Organs of Admittance, and who channels Neil Young & Matt Valentine with his unique vocalizations and six-stringed deftness.  Sol’s been active in the psychedelic sub-underground for a few years now, with efforts for esteemed labels such as Eiderdown, Deep Water Acres and Beyond Beyond is Beyond, but it took three labels to harness the hallucinatory energy of Enter the Stream.  This psychotropic slice of modern folk arrives courtesy of the Cardinal Fuzz, Sunrise OceanBender and Eggs in Aspic imprints.

Sol employs multiple elements to weave his gravity-defying sound worlds.  In addition to a high register croon and multiple layers of fluid guitar, there are synths, singing bowls, field recordings, drums and other percussion threaded into the eight pieces presented here.  Thematically, nature and the spirit are intertwined.  Lush energies are kindled immediately as the eponymous opening track unfurls.

Introduced with a gong hit and book-ended by field recordings of rushing water, a simple strummed guitar and repeated lyric belie the cerebellum-shattering trip that comprises the two succeeding tracks.  “Moon Through Fern Lattice” and “Mycorhizzal Brainstorm” occupy the more trance-inducing edge of the Prana Crafter spectrum.  Thick contrails of juicy synthesizer waft overhead like curlicues of colored smoke as Sol’s guitar writhes melodically.  A miasma of drone prevails until “The Spell” introduces a more grounded sort of reverie.

The Crazy Horse-inspired “Old North Wind” shifts the proceedings homeward with its loping rhythm section and sparsely ornamented arrangement.  It fades into a pair of shamanic drone pieces, which provide a feverish dreamlike drift.  “At the Dawn” closes out the proceedings with an air of melancholia, and the album ends as it began, the rushing water this time fading into echoed whispers of ‘nothing’.

Dream with the mountains in a kingdom outside of time with Prana Crafter; Enter the Stream is available in all three physical formats from the labels involved, and digitally via Bandcamp.