Their Time Is Coming Soon.
In 2005 the Montreal band The High Dials released a pretty great album called War Of The Wakening Phantoms. It was a disc that opened strong with two great songs (“Holy Ground” and “Strandhill Sands”) and sealed the deal with a song that defies easy description, a 5-minute epic called “Our Time Is Coming Soon”.
I’ve written about “Our Time Is Coming Soon” here a few times over the years, but screw it, I’m gonna do it again. “Our Time Is Coming Soon” is absolutely, hands-down my favorite song of the 2000’s so far. The opening two chord riff sets the stage, like gale force winds presaging a hurricane. They go unconventional after the first chorus and head straight to a bridge before the second verse, and Rishi Dhir plays one of the most kick-ass sitar solos of all time there (I actually kind of hate the sitar; to my taste it sorta is Asia’s answer to Scotland’s bagpipes as far as “instruments that make me want to run away” go…so saying a sitar solo is “kick ass” is no faint praise.) By the time they get to the final vocal bridge the song is in full blazing glory, and you wonder how they’re going to end this cyclone–almost always when a song gets as epic as “Our Time Is Coming Soon” gets, the creative juice runs out on the conclusion and things go out perfunctorily at best, if you’re lucky. Not so on here, though: “Our Time Is Coming Soon” ends like a supernova; the snare fill that starts martial and ends up galloping just as a descending guitar figure drops in gets your pulse racing, and then the drums turn into Keith Moon and the sound goes maelstrom and when they finally take their feet off the gas and let the song end, you realize The High Dials have managed a song unlike almost anything else anyone has even attempted in the post-Nirvana rock years.
The High Dials got a lot of deserved good press for War Of The Wakening Phantoms, but I’m not sure that translated into moving units. After what seemed like a hectic and gruelling year of touring in the States and through Europe, the Dials seemed rather emotionally spent. They lost their secret weapon when Rishi Dhir decided to opt out of the group. 2006 and 2007 went by without hearing much from the group. Their website went dark. Rainbow Quartz, their US label, has updated their site about twice since last October. Reading tour diaries/blogs from guitarist/singer/songwriter Trevor Anderson–who seems a great guy, but also seemed mentally exhausted by the time Dhir had left the group–I figured I’d heard the last from this once-promising band.
Not so! Back in May, the Dials promised to start posting songs from a new album on their Myspace page. The new record–which will be a double album–is called Moon Country. They’ve got 6 songs up at Myspace, and hoo-boy…if these six songs are representative of what’s to come on the full album, we may have us a contender for album of the year here. The High Dials seemed to respond to losing a musical element like Dhir by opening up their sound and letting their talent run wild. The band’s debut album, A New Devotion is pretty nifty, but it has an almost claustrophobic retro psychedelic sound that induces a little too much listener fatigue if taken in large doses. Phantoms, the second album, shows them opening things up a bit, with nods to more modern dreampop sounds like Kitchens Of Distinction or Ride.
Moon Country, at least based on the evidence of these six songs, takes that hinted-at direction of Phantoms and runs with it. “Do The Memory Lapse” could be vintage For Against or less blippy New Order. “These Days Mean Nothing To Me” manages to be both psychedelic and still manage a Kitchens influence while walking a fine line between light and darkness (the airy harmony on the chorus that gives way to the angry guitar chug right after is wonderful!) “Cartoon Breakup” opens with wheezy Melon Collie synths and then manages to give you four glorious minutes of spectacular, timeless loveliness. “Open Up The Gates” is a nod to their lysergic side, but far more interesting than you’d ever expect a song that could be described as a psychedelic pop song to be.
The real stunner here though is a song called “Killer Of Dragons”, which sounds like nothing else The High Dials have ever done. It is a gorgeous, beautiful track that delivers on every promise and all the potential this band has ever shown. If there were any justice in the world, “Killer Of Dragons” would become the massive top ten hit it richly deserves to be, but probably won’t because it won’t get the push to radio and retail it deserves. Ah well.
In any event, Moon Country I think is still slated for a September release, at least in Canada. I can’t wait to hear the whole thing, either. Over their past two records, when people talk about The High Dials, they talk about who they sound like; on these new songs, the greatest accomplishment on display is that the Dials sound like no one else but themselves. Keep a sharp eye out for this’n.
The High Dials Myspace Page, where you can bliss out on these six slabs of rock greatness…
Reason Eighty Gajillion to be an Emusic Subscriber…
Things are a tad slow this time of year waiting on new releases; in addition to me being stoked for some stuff mentioned elsewhere on this page, it seems as if Cobra Verde is set to come out of hibernation this year with a new disc; Petkovich promises some tracks from it to hit their myspace page soon.
At any rate, the slowness of the new releases hasn’t kept me from hitting up Emusic once or twice a week to listen to a bunch of really, really, mediocre-to-godawful music, searching out a diamond in the rough, usually in vain. Tonight when I got home from work, though, I notice that they’ve got Pulp’s final album, We Love Life newly available.
Life came out in 2001 in the UK, 2002 in the States. Chances are fairly good you missed it, and that’s a damned shame because you missed out on a brilliant final statement from an absolutely essential band. In fact, I’d say the final three songs on the album (and, one supposes, the final three Pulp songs ever) are as incredible a three song album closer as anyone’s come up with in a while. “Bad Cover Version” is a soaring, string-draped nod to Pulp’s earlier days, but then comes “Roadkill”, which is a quietly disturbing little bit of wonder….and then the whole thing goes rocketing straight to the heart of ol’ Sol on “Sunrise”.
On that last track, I should mention that anytime I listen to We Love Life all the way through, the final guitar raveup on “Sunrise” always gives me goosebumps and chills, and I wondered if that was just me being a dork. Apparently not:
I mean, can I get an “Amen”??? Oh yeah, in that clip that is indeed ‘Narc fave rave Richard Hawley on acoustic guitar. We Love Life, another reason why Emusic is still worth your fifteen bucks a month…
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Amazing Reissue Alert.
While poking around the site at Light In The Attic Records to see what The Blakes were up to of late, I noticed quite a bit of pimpage there for a reissue they’ve got coming out later in August by someone called Rodriguez. They’re not the only ones on the Rodriguez tip, either; The Greatest Music Magazine On The Planet, a/k/a MOJO, just gave Rodriguez’s reissue a 4-star review.
Huh.
The album is called Cold Fact. It came out in 1970 originally, and let’s cut right to the chase: it has a totally kick-ass cover.
Beyond that, it was an early production project of the amazing Dennis Coffey/Mike Theodore team (you know how dope Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” sounds? Yeah, those guys produced and played on it (along with the late incarnation of Motown’s vaunted Funk Brothers). Those guys worked with a who’s who of heavy hitters in Detroit, and performed/produced a number of famous funk/soul sides in the early ’70’s, stuff that’s been sampled to death by folks like the Beastie Boys, Nas, and Wu Tang Clan). So, yeah, its got that going for it.
The other thing it has going for it is Rodriguez himself, or Sixto Rodriguez as he was known to pals. Rodriguez was an inner city kind of guy, and Cold Fact is all about the tumultuous and downright frightening world of the late sixties urban landscape viewed from an angry, up-close lens.
Cold Fact didn’t sell many copies when it came out. For one thing, Sixto Rodriguez had some interesting ideas about promoting it. At an early industry showcase, he played a truncated set with his back to the audience (years before Michael Stipe or The Brian Jonestown Massacre, even!) His idea of a gig was to play at what Mike Theodore called “hooker bars, inner city dives, biker bars”. The record sank without much fanfare and Sixto Rodriguez moved on and that would’ve been that…
…except that for some reason students and counterculturally-inclined youths in South Africa and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe started buy Cold Fact. They bought a lot of it, too–according to Light In The Attic, they made the damned thing a platinum record down there. Vinyl diving turntablists discovered the opening track on the album, “Sugar Man” and brought that harrowing, beautifully disturbing song a bigger audience.
At any rate, I’ve been listening to Cold Fact non-stop for the better part of a week, and I can unconditionally recommend it. “Sugar Man”, the opening track, is an absolutely disconcerting piece of urban latin folk pop, kind of like what you’d get if Love’s delicate “Alone Again, Or” had the feel of “A House Is Not A Motel”. Tunes like “Crucify Your Mind”, “Inner City Blues”, “I Wonder”, “Rich Folks Hoax”, and the sublime “Like Janis” sound like soundtracks for movies like Serpico or Taxi Driver or Mean Streets. If you’re looking for the perfect soundtrack for a George Pelecanos novel, Cold Fact is it. Put “Sugar Man” on your iPod and take a midnight stroll in the city and just see if you’re not feeling much more uneasy than you normally would, just see if you’re not suddenly doing a lot more looking over your shoulder. That’s the power of Rodriguez’s brilliant, beautifully bleak and angry urban take on Donovan here. With a quiet, unsettling and understated acoustic beauty, Cold Fact stands as the most essential reissue I’ve heard all year.
“Just Like Janis”:
Popnarcotic 