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Acid King: III

16/06/09 || Khlysty

When I thought about reviewing Acid King’s “III”, I was actually quite hesitant. See, maybe I’m wrong, but I think that there’s a really bad vibe towards “stoner” that permeates the metal community and that makes metal fans very mistrustful –even hostile- towards what I like to call “groove-THC-drenched-slow-Sabbathic-worship-rock”. Of course, I can explain this whole attitude: when Kyuss and their brethren became “in”, everyone and their granddad picked up an SG, downtuned it, fuzzed it out to hell and started blindly replicating the old and tested Black Sabbath gospel. The “scene” became oversaturated and the mediocre-to-awful bands became the sound du jour for anyone who couldn’t make out the difference between good and bad music.

Anyway, with those things in mind, I cannot but recommend Acid King to anyone who still enjoys this kind of music. See, even if one accuses the band of being derivative, one still cannot but admire the way Lori S and her two pardners in crime lay down some absofuckinglutely earth-shaking, mind-altering, meaty grooves. Yesh, lads and lassies, this is the name of the game here: riffery to lose your mind, grooves to shake your booty and an overall vibe that manages to be tough-as-nails, menacing and totally relaxed in and of itself, all at the same time. This record could’ve been done with the band half-asleep. BUT it’s also the culmination of years’ experience in making super-dense, super-heavy groove-monsters.

One thing that the listener has to have always in mind is that this record is proof positive of the theories of quantum physics, especially the parts about the time- and space-displacement. I mean, the cd last 46 minutes, but believe me when I say that it would seem much longer, especially when the band gets all comfy-cosy in some slow jam, with multiple layers of guitar so fuzzed-out it’s almost illegal swirling around in a stoned-out haze, creating a sense of time-elongation. Add to this Lori S’s almost-tuneless bark and there you have it: the sound of narcotics’ induced collapse of the whole fucking universe. And, with Billy Anderson handling the production, well, you can be pretty fucking sure you won’t miss anything, even when all’s fuzzed-out to hell.

Most of the songs overpass the 5-minute mark (with the centerpiece of the record, the monstrous “War Of The Mind”, reaching the 12-minute mark), but there’s no redundancy here: everything is as it should be with this kind of music, with the riffs bloating to cosmically-challenging vortices, so that the listener can comfortably lose himself in them. This is music whose roots reach real back, into the brackish bongwater left by Blue Cheer, early Sabbath et al, carrying the resin residue back to these days, multiplying its power with the help of the amplification and creating a space neither here, not there, an almost trance-like hole in the universal fabric, in which the band exists.

I think that it’s useless talking about individual songs here: just bear in mind that everything is long, slow, loud and mind-fucking. This is not something new or envelope-pushing. But, hey, if you want to get your rocks off, I couldn’t think of anything better. Go buy Acid King’s “III”, prepare yourselves accordingly and, well, may the mighty groove help you…

8 resin-coated, mind-altering groove-monsters out 10.

Information
Released: 2005
Label: Small Stone Records
Website: www.acidking.com
Band
Lori S: vocals, guitar
Guy Pinhas: bass
Joey Osbourne: drums

Tracklist
01. 2 Wheel Nation
02. Heavy Load
03. Bad Vision
04. War of the Mind
05. Into the Ground
06. On to Everafter
07. Sunshine and Sorrow

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