 It's lucky the first song's got a catchy enough chorus, cause by about the sixteenth time around I'd be getting plenty bored with it. It's called People Fall Down and it's a yammering, stammering, drunken stupor of an opening track that does nothing to suggest edge of your seat excitement, but rather flat on your ass immobility after the tenth hour toke.
Message To Shareholders is a mid-paced follower with a murky voice drowned in heavy echo and Devil's music. People Fall Down, Wizard Of The Upper Snake River, Keep On Truckin . . . okay, I'm not blind to the purple haze forming over my personal sphere, but Message To Shareholders? As if the name weren't indicative enough, Caustic Resin are what you might consider 'stoner rock' . . . . if you were over eighty and resting comfortably in your rocker of choice. To the rest of the world, they're a drearily paced wall of psychedelia and Symptom Of The Universe-era Sabbath . . . acid drenched, denim music with an Ozzy drown-alike buried in dread, dead but dreaming, and Tom Petty's sophomoric summer of '72 basement break.
There are moments of debilitating delight underlying the billow, like on Wizard Of The Upper Snake River, which has got some great guitar FX and mid-song wow and flutter that shakes loose the cobwebs. And Drive #47; is pure desert rock, be it from Santa Fe, Santa Cruz, or the south side of the fucking moon, giving you that out of body experience as your spirit sinks beneath your senses.
Not without acclaim, Caustic Resin boasts guys like Brett Netson and Mike Johnson, both of whom have logged mileage in bands like Built To Spill, Dinosaur Jr. and Queens Of The Stone Age. They've been doing this for six albums and some fifteen years since they first sparked up the desire to get a high off a heavy coded guitar buzz. So one might say they're latecomer veterans of the Chevy van scene. Others might say wake me when it's over.
There is a depth beneath the outward crawl of the songs, but it stays safely tucked in the slow lane for most of the ride. I suggest listening should take place at a moment of high alert, otherwise Keep On Truckin's a lucid, slightly artsy and abrasive first gear descent down the steep hill of hallucination. :: Vinnie Apicella |
