“Mighty Redwood forest / Slay me with your shade.” Two lines that rather elegantly summarize a lot of what Olde Growth is about. I slept on this video premiere for a couple weeks after seeing it on The Obelisk and I also had intended to work up a bit about their self-titled sole studio release into one of my “stuff from 2011″ posts, but have ended up taking a long time to get around to that too. Somehow I suspect Olde Growth wouldn’t have a problem with that, as they take their time with things too, seeming to intentionally grow their profile at the pace of the ancient “giant of the Western shore” that they celebrate in this brilliant piece of transcendental Americana forest doom. The Boston duo first self-released Olde Growth on free download and on CD in eco-friendly packaging back in 2010 and I’m pretty sure it was the now-defunct Doomed To Be Stoned In A Sludge Swamp download blog where I first heard of it (among may other excellent bands such as the distinctly more urban themed Kowloon Walled City; incidentally if you missed it, some of the Swampers now have something to do with Doommantia). Meteor City picked up the band and reissued the album last year, making it now one of my favorite albums of two different years. It is currently one of the $6.66 “Killer Deals” at All That Is Heavy making it one hell of a deal measured in awesome-per-dollar.

It’s gotten a lot of mention from me here on this site as well, which is a lot of words expended on a band with such a scant quantity of recordings out in a two-year span. Probably because I like it a lot. Of course, I’m a sucker for drummer-bassist duos. The fuzz bass is often thickened up with an octave pedal giving it a majestic church-organ-like tone. Stylistically Olde Growth draw from a wide area of doom and psychedelic metal in their riffs and variations of tempos and vocal tones. Many sections have a distinctly bell-bottom vibe, especially those with melodic vocals, fittingly with the mystical and nature themes in the lyrics. Other tracks involve epic battles or fantasy themes. Opener “The Grand Illusion” is particularly notable for describing 20th century warfare in rewind, with such imagery as planes flying backwards vacuuming up bombs. Darker passages, sometimes touching on warfare and/or destruction, draw tastefully from death doom and sludge; “Cry of the Nazgul” (the first section of a three-part track) works a spot-on Noothgrush impression. I’d also definitely recommend this band to Yob fans.

Credits list only the two band members Stephen LoVerme on bass and vocals and Ryan Berry on drums but a couple other sounds pop up. I could swear there’s a guitar solo in “Life in the Present”; “Red Dwarf” is a short synthesizer space-out forming an intermezzo between “Sequoia” and the rest of the album’s second half such that it flows as a kind of suite, intentionally or not, and somewhere in the instrumental “Everything Dies” I’m almost certain I hear some mellotron. Or maybe this could all be clever use of effects on the bass.

Olde Growth should be wrapping up a tour tonight wherein probably the closest they came to Des Moines was Grand Rapids, Michigan but they definitely deserve some attention further west.

Orthodox – “Matse Avatar”
This one has definitely held up for me. Being a bit new to the band but loving these two songs so much, I’ve gone and checked out some of their previous material and they do a really intriguing mix of doom and jazz with some medieval folk overtones, and on some of their stuff they go all-out acoustic with string bass and trumpet. Their name has a delightful irony to it as they seem to piss off a lot of purists. How could I possibly not love a band like that?

Samuel Locke-Ward & The Boo-Hoos/Mumfords split 7″
The relatively straightforward loud rock tunes of the Boo-Hoos side has needed a little time to grow on me, but I’m starting to catch myself humming “When It’s Gone It’s Gone” at idle moments. Sam has definitely assembled a crack band, too. Check out Rachel Feldman’s bass lines! And I still love this Mumford’s song.

Poison Control Center – Sad Sour Future
One of this year’s most important albums for Iowa music fans. I think the last real “breakout” Iowa band was probably Modern Life Is War (at least if you follow the hardcore scene — I didn’t realize how big they had gotten until I started noticing them name-dropped in unexpected corners of the Web) but now in 2010 we have Davenport’s Mondo Drag and these guys both releasing a strong album, playing some big shows, and working the road hard. Of the two, PCC definitely get more press in central Iowa (Mondo Drag got as much as a slightly puzzled mention on the We Hate Music podcast last week), and they have a long history here and mountains of well-deserved love and respect. What criticism Sad Sour Future draws seems to be for its length, but there isn’t a bum song on it. 17 songs in 71 minutes just reflects the firehose of creativity that these guys are. The curse-side of this blessing is that it’s hard to name a standout song or three in the midst of such a big slab of consistently fine material. Also I wonder whether the music scene is yet ready for an updating of Pavementesque slacker guitars and mid-period Flaming Lips whimsy — a lot of the core audience for that kind of thing is grown-up, settled-down, and has a hard time making it out to the rock clubs for anything less than ’90s heroes reunited. Will today’s indie kids hear this as something new or something old? Hopefully they hear is for what it is, something awesome.

Olde Growth s/t
I missed out on the limited edition of 100 CDs this two-man psychedelic doom band self-released this year but did grab a download while they were still giving them out and am looking forward to Meteor City putting it out next year. Will probably write a little more about it then.

It’s True! s/t
One of my top albums of the year by a Midwest band, maybe by any band, this CD out of Omaha deserves as much accolades on artistry alone as does Sad Sour Future. Heard it playing between sets at the Mews recently and wanted to shout to the crowd to quiet down for a couple minutes to listen. I didn’t mention it in my earlier article, but at times Adam Hawkins’s voice reminds me George Michael in his prime, and it works awesomely (see “What Have I Done?”). Last I heard, Hawkins moved to Ames, so I’m guessing this lineup is over. Hopefully he hooks up with a new crew and makes another record this good.

Cathedral – The Guessing Game
Another album of possibly excessive length, this was actually my introduction to these doom-metal stalwarts, and it may not be the best album for that, given how much has been made of the incorporation of early 70s prog-rock influences as a new element to the sound. The progressive melodies and mellotrons work beautifully on the instrumental title track, “Death of an Anarchist,” “Cats, Incense, Candles & Wine,” and a few other tracks, but the transitions between metal chug and odd-meter marimbas on “Funeral of Dreams” still feel clunky. Said track, coming early in the album, also suffers from another of the album’s downfalls, which is the occasional presence of some rather corny lyrics, especially when Lee Dorian goes for the simplistic attacks on the sociopolitical establishment and Christianity. But then again, these work toward the same everyman appeal that doom metal so often builds on, that got my attention the first time I heard a St. Vitus album. Still, I often find myself moving on before this track is up, forgetting how I’d be rewarded if I stuck it out. The band displays very accomplished musicianship and writing, both on the proggy bits and when they are in their wheelhouse of ominous crunchy riffage. Predominantly clean vocals and a lot of very catchy riffs and melodies give the album some pop appeal; in a better world, the ode to Edwige Fenech (I had to Google for the reference, to be honest) “Edwige’s Eyes” would be a radio hit. But there’s a good measure of heaviness and appealingly “difficult” moments like “The Running Man,” which revisits the pounding of King Crimson’s classic “21st Century Schizoid Man” then builds into a noise rave-up. Generally though, Cathedral have gone beyond mere riffing and dark atmosphere to write songs, which is something I really enjoy hearing in a heavy album.

Boston psych-doom duo Olde Growth, to whom I gave a shout-out here back in June, announced today via the mailing list gathered from their bandcamp account that they have hooked up with the label MeteorCity (home to another band I quite dig, Black Pyramid), and that MeteorCity will be (re-)releasing the self-titled CD that Olde Growth self-released in a limited hand-made edition of 100 earlier back in March. The news arrived in my inbox not long after I had given their album another spin on my iPod, oddly enough.

Upside: the world will get more CD copies of Olde Growth’s debut; downside: this probably means that the days are numbered for the free bandcamp download of it (the email states, “we will probably keep it up for another week or so”) — so if you haven’t looked into them yet, I’d suggest you check it out while you can, plus it gets you on their email list. It appears they also still have copies of the original CD hand-made release for sale at that same link, so it couldn’t hurt to get hold of that.

I’ve been listening to this a bunch lately and thought I’d share it. Olde Growth, who I heard about randomly somewhere online, is a bass/drums two-piece. I have a bit of a thing for bands with that kind of lineup ever since I saw godHeadSilo in the basement of the Black Hawk Labor Temple in Waterloo in ’94. (In fact, I’m interested in a drummer for Distant Trains if any of my drumming friends are interested in getting in on that.) The sound is heavy sludge doom kind of like a backwoodsy Electric Wizard. They’re giving the download of this album out for free at http://oldegrowth.bandcamp.com and I found a web site for the band at http://www.oldegrowth.com/. No word on whether you can get it on CD but the cover art looks like a screen-printed rough cardboard sleeve so I suspect such an artifact does in fact exist.