John Garcia & The Band Of Gold
John Garcia & The Band Of Gold Napalm
Riding his Kyuss legacy hard into the ground, John Garcia’s latest outing (after a slew of promising solo work) sounds like desert rock’s diminishing returns. Fêted, quite rightly, as the founder of the band who would most like to have been the 1970s Black Sabbath, he, along with Brant Bjork and Josh Homme (both doing sterling work elsewhere these days) brought contemporary stoner rock dancing out of the desert.
There’s no denying the wonder at the heart of at least two of the Kyuss albums, but their smoky magic is missing in this hard record, which sounds like an approximation of a band trying to capture those splashy grooves. Garcia’s voice is still a rasping wonder, and bringing in Chris Goss to add lustre to what sounds like a collection of songs captured in a garage is inspired, but it’s not enough to lift these thrashy, stuttering jams (and occasionally ludicrous lyrics), which sound like the work of a much younger man staring at the sun-bleached horizon and wondering what tomorrow might yet bring.
philip Wilding