With a name like
Harsh Toke
, you might know what you're in for. Heavy, relentless blues-metal guitar in constant jam mode with no off switch? Pounding drums and fuzzy, incense smoke-reeking basslines? Swimming psychedelia of the most impaired variety?
deliver all of the above on their debut full-length album
Light Up and Live
, with just four tracks stretching into some cosmic exploration over the album's 40-odd minute running time. Like a hazy dream, the band segue from the
Sabbath
-worshiping album-opener "Rest in Prince" directly into a breakdown of random percussion and watery flutes on the beginning of the epic suite "Weight of the Sun," which transitions from its gentle
Popol Vuh
-reminiscent beginnings into a loopy, narcotic blur of delayed guitars and screaming organ nightmares. Clearly from the same school of jamming and mind expansion that gave us great albums like
Sleep
's
Dopesmoker
, but dialing back the heavy doom and dread that characterized that record,
gets into stoner jams as unhinged, ecstatic, and wandering as some of the greats. There's a slight cartoonishness that comes with the revivalism of acid rock's early days, but despite weed-centric titles like "Light Up and Live,"
mostly keep the focus on their restless, druggy rhythms and the interplay between guitarist
Justin Figueroa
's endless edge-of-the-world soloing and vocalist/organist
Gabe Messer
's psychedelic keyboard washes. The band even get into more outlandish territory on the ten-minute album-closer "Plug Into the Moon," with the addition of a saxophone player as wild and unglued as the rest of the band in his epic jamming. The song recalls the same wanton, desperate energy of "L.A. Blues," the sax/noise closer to
the Stooges
Fun House
, and it constructs similar walls of unhinged noise, menace, and transcendence with its barrage of sound. ~ Fred Thomas