It had been a few years after the release of V when 2019 saw the first of a years’ worth of monthly song releases started as the band re-explored all their instruments from Amphibia Studios in Leicester. From Birth of a Star to Supernova to El Indio, the 1st of the month always had you wondering what they had constructed the previous few weeks.
Roll on to 2020 and they’re back to the album format with a collection of ten songs that they have been working on over the last few years with the line-up of Mark Buteux, Gavin Searle, Dodge Watson, Tony Heslop and Lee Madel-Toner.
Monotron’s psychedelic intro layers keyboards upon guitars and forms something of a 70’s sci-fi backing track. It has a laid back yet majestic feel to it and spends its 97 seconds building and building into something special that you know has been too long in coming. I would probably compare it to seeing a band headline a festival that rarely play live and your locked into the zone when the lights go down and there’s the magical energy in the air.
The big opening riff for Ever and Forever slowly rolls in with thick fuzzy layers of guitar. It only take seconds, but you are already back sat at the wheel of a dirty old Dodge pick-up, travelling through the night from town to deserted town, heading into the ass end of nowhere. The riffs and the drumming feel structured in a robotic space like fashion, which enhances that repetitive journey into the unknown, and there's still nod to classic early Queens of The Stone Age. The mix of male/female vocals and use of both voices as instruments (the oooohs and aaaaahs) and guitar work around the line “where nobody goes, where no one knows” adds to the mystic of the track. Who knows where the pick-up will end up?
Bad Trip floats in and enters your brain like LSD should do. A single drum beat and keyboard note lifts you to a level deep in the sub-conscious before a guitar riff that slides side to side without actually ending. The vocals overlap and harmonise as they drift in and out and mould themselves around that guitar without properly showing who they are. As another keyboard enters, you can feel it pull the guitar in a slightly different direction as though the trip is turning bad, before everything fades away.
Toxic Heart is like the antidote to Bad Trip with its positive new beginnings feel to the riff the track is built around. A slow meandering track that sounds very psychedelic in an English way.
Pigs in Space opens with huge sounding repetitive riffs that take you off in to a space bound journey before the keyboards swing you away, then push you back towards the stars. Again the clever use of the voice as an instrument that drones in and out has you thinking this would fit well on a Desert Sessions record.
Sicario has a slow doomy reflective feel to it that sounds quite haunting, and Brainless is a 3 minute instrumental that shows how good Leicester’s finest are.
The female vocals that start the layered vocal build up to Murderer have that feeling of early Monster Magnet and about 2 minutes in the riff kicks in over the whaling keyboards and it builds to sounding absolutely huge. My only complaint is that it finishes far too quickly.
I am the Hurricane follows straight on with big stoner rock riffs that swings between high mountain summits and deep canyon depths. Like it hurricane, the song slowly rolls and rolls and rolls along.
Closing the record is Fine, a song that could be and probably should be your favourite hit of the summer. I admit that whenever the internet radio is playing at home, it’s tuned into a station dedicated to 90’s alt-rock or grunge, and Fine would fit perfectly in there somewhere. Kicking off with a warm fuzzy opening riff, before some jangle and then the guitar just talks to you as the song struts along with a confident swagger. There’s layers of vocals, keyboards, harmonies and there is a poppy feel to it in the way The Dandy Warhols have the knack of writing good songs. I dare you not to be humming the chorus for the rest of the week.
With the first listen, VI clicked with me and it just sounds better and better with every play, and believe me, it’s been played many times this week. VI is The Kings of Frog Island at their finest again which will no doubt please the regulars as well as bring in more listeners. They finally have a live show booked in for later this year which we should all be psyched about and hopefully this pandemic doesn’t bump it again.
Kozmic Artifactz have released VI on vinyl in transparent blue or a tasty amphibious green/black splatter.
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