Carlton Melton - Country Ways (CD, Vinyl LP)

Brand new album from Carlton Melton, The San Franciscan four-piece Carlton Melton release Country Ways (Agitated), a new jam of gargantuan proportions. Featuring former Zen Guerilla members, Andy Duvall (guitar and drums) and Rich Millman (guitar and synthesizers) alongside Brian McDougall (drums) and John Steuernagel (bass), Country Ways is their second album conjuring colossal riff laden dronescapes and parched psychedelically enhanced spacerock creating a mind altering magick carpet ride down the Californian highway.... Loud, uncompromising, and yet not a blundering stoned beast, this album has levels of delicate pastoral San Franciscan psych blowing through the almost freeform spaced noise jam. Unlike many of their contemporaries, White Hills, Wooden Ships, Cave, Steve Hillage, Bardo Pond, White Noise Sound etc. Carlton Melton are less concerned with the pulse, rhythm, and the groove, as they are with the SOUND, and the VIBE, weaving lush, expansive sprawls of FX drenched psychedelic ambience; drifting more often than driving, huge clouds of swirling wah guitars, and minimal spare drumming, existing more as a pulse, than a beat - the band drift weightless though swirling starlit sonic skies before the descent into trance inducing drones burrowing deep into the earth. Their sound - loose, free, abstract and ephemeral. Carlton Melton have made two albums since they formed in 2008, and for several reasons these recordings are unique. For one, they were recorded in what is known as a geodesic dome in rural Mendocino County, north of San Francisco. These domes are typically large spherical buildings shaped like golf balls used as homes for the green-minded, greenhouses, theatres or whatever. Carlton Melton's dome is miles away from anywhere and is hollow. The place makes Bron Yr Aur look state-of-the-art, so unequipped to record music is it. Yet the band love it, and its ruggedness is there in the music. Their first album Pass It On released on vinyl in 2009 by Mid To late (the band's own label) was proclaimed by J Mascis as his favourite of the year.

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