"Kuss Lives"

[Steve Swann]

Beg to differ about Kyuss Lives.  No one was more skeptical than me about
Kyuss touring without Josh, but all the videos I have seen of them on
youtube sound FANTASTIC.  If they come to this country I am soooooooo going
to see them.

And, I think the reason that song you linked sounds pretty shitty for a
rendition of Gardenia is because it's *not* Gardenia....  I mean, tell me
that there's anything to complain about this version of Gardenia, recorded
on the current tour:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3zqXy85r4M

And I can't stop listening to this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3gTQpa-O14

Steve


On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Jonathan Jarrett <
jjarrett at coriolis.greenend.org.uk> wrote:

> On Fri, 1 Apr 2011, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
>
>  On 01 Apr 2011, at 04:23 , Jonathan Jarrett wrote:
>>
>>>        That's not so much that it's bad, though, as much as it's that
>>> they've been going for forty years and most people tuned out after ten. If,
>>> by some chance that I agree is unlikely, they produced a new _Doremi_ next
>>> year, they still wouldn't be remembered for it because only a fraction of
>>> their `fanbase' would ever hear it.
>>>
>>
>> Although I would bet that at least that fraction would be less ambivalent
>> about an album that had Doremi's vibe.
>>
>
>        Oh, certainly! But that's not the noise they make any more. And in
> fact, who does make a noise like that? Seriously, I'd like to know. F/i, I
> suppose, in their own eighties way. The closest I've ever seen was a doom
> band called Warhorse, who had all the requisite wokka-wokka noises on guitar
> *and* a bassist with mutton-chop sideburns playing a Rickenbacker, but they
> broke up before recording the (second) album that would have had that stuff
> on, which was a crying shame. Kyuss's _Sky Valley_ is a fairly honest homage
> as well as a fantastic album, and OK there is *a* Kyuss touring but since it
> is without Josh Homme or indeed Scott Reeder, I fear it cannot be the same
> and the frankly unrecognisable version of `Gardenia' here:
>
> http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=148693
> does not inspire me with confidence. Wikipedia says there will be a new
> album this year and you know, I'll buy it if there is, but it won't be _Sky
> Valley_.
>
>        Can one define the Doremi vibe, just in terms of technique? I mean
> obviously one has to actually have some songs too but if you had some songs
> and wanted to record them like _Doremi_, what would you need? (Apart from
> terrible microphones, a studio full of rattle and echo and a truckload of
> drugs, I mean.) Seems to me that the key ingredients are:
>
> it's heavy but not distorted, which is not to say no effects obviously but
> just that a lot of the vocals and treble lines are clean and sound `true',
> so tune down but sing up (otherwise Farflung would already be providing this
> album with each release);
>
> it's slow, it lurches, even the twelve-string bits are not exactly jigs, so
> write doom;
>
> it's lyrically mantric but artfully arranged (for example, did you ever
> hear a non-folk band do the trick in `Time We Left...' where the call goes
> round in four but the answer goes round in three till it meets up again?
> they didn't even try this live, it would do my head in counting it for
> sure), so grab a performance poet with old-fashioned ideas for the lyrics;
>
> it sounds *distant* in a way that compliments the theme of the lyrics (I
> don't know how to do this bit), and;
>
> it's *continuous*, so that the whole recording (or its two halves) unfold
> as a whole, whether the tracks are actually run into each other or just
> linked by electronic interludes. So write with a mind on flow and sequence.
> (Again, note Kyuss's suites on _Sky Valley_.)
>
> None of these are logistically impossible to achieve, or even that
> expensive surely; it just takes a certain amount of guts and perversity to
> compose that way, I guess. And, of course, you have to be a good enough
> musician and composer to do it at all!
>
>
>  Whether it is "really Hawkwind" or not doesn't concern me so much as
>> whether it's really any good.
>>
>
>        I agree. On that score I would say that the BotE studio disc is `all
> right' but probably not `good', and that the live disc is `good' to `very
> good'. Yours,
>                    Jon
>
>
> --
>      Jonathan Jarrett, Oxford       jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
>   =======================================================================
>  "With Capitalism, man exploits man.  With Socialism, it is exactly
> opposite"
>                         -Robert Anton Wilson
>