"Kuss Lives"

[Steve Swann]

One last point regarding missing members, although I also have the greatest
admiration for Scott Reeder, Nick Oliveri is no slouch and was in fact an
original member.

Steve

On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Steve Swann <swann1066 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Beg to differ about Kyuss Lives.  No one was more skeptical than me about
> Kyuss touring without Josh, but all the videos I have seen of them on
> youtube sound FANTASTIC.  If they come to this country I am soooooooo going
> to see them.
>
> And, I think the reason that song you linked sounds pretty shitty for a
> rendition of Gardenia is because it's *not* Gardenia....  I mean, tell me
> that there's anything to complain about this version of Gardenia, recorded
> on the current tour:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3zqXy85r4M
>
> And I can't stop listening to this one:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3gTQpa-O14
>
> Steve
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 8:33 AM, Jonathan Jarrett <
> jjarrett at coriolis.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 1 Apr 2011, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
>>
>>  On 01 Apr 2011, at 04:23 , Jonathan Jarrett wrote:
>>>
>>>>        That's not so much that it's bad, though, as much as it's that
>>>> they've been going for forty years and most people tuned out after ten. If,
>>>> by some chance that I agree is unlikely, they produced a new _Doremi_ next
>>>> year, they still wouldn't be remembered for it because only a fraction of
>>>> their `fanbase' would ever hear it.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Although I would bet that at least that fraction would be less ambivalent
>>> about an album that had Doremi's vibe.
>>>
>>
>>        Oh, certainly! But that's not the noise they make any more. And in
>> fact, who does make a noise like that? Seriously, I'd like to know. F/i, I
>> suppose, in their own eighties way. The closest I've ever seen was a doom
>> band called Warhorse, who had all the requisite wokka-wokka noises on guitar
>> *and* a bassist with mutton-chop sideburns playing a Rickenbacker, but they
>> broke up before recording the (second) album that would have had that stuff
>> on, which was a crying shame. Kyuss's _Sky Valley_ is a fairly honest homage
>> as well as a fantastic album, and OK there is *a* Kyuss touring but since it
>> is without Josh Homme or indeed Scott Reeder, I fear it cannot be the same
>> and the frankly unrecognisable version of `Gardenia' here:
>>
>> http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=148693
>> does not inspire me with confidence. Wikipedia says there will be a new
>> album this year and you know, I'll buy it if there is, but it won't be _Sky
>> Valley_.
>>
>>        Can one define the Doremi vibe, just in terms of technique? I mean
>> obviously one has to actually have some songs too but if you had some songs
>> and wanted to record them like _Doremi_, what would you need? (Apart from
>> terrible microphones, a studio full of rattle and echo and a truckload of
>> drugs, I mean.) Seems to me that the key ingredients are:
>>
>> it's heavy but not distorted, which is not to say no effects obviously but
>> just that a lot of the vocals and treble lines are clean and sound `true',
>> so tune down but sing up (otherwise Farflung would already be providing this
>> album with each release);
>>
>> it's slow, it lurches, even the twelve-string bits are not exactly jigs,
>> so write doom;
>>
>> it's lyrically mantric but artfully arranged (for example, did you ever
>> hear a non-folk band do the trick in `Time We Left...' where the call goes
>> round in four but the answer goes round in three till it meets up again?
>> they didn't even try this live, it would do my head in counting it for
>> sure), so grab a performance poet with old-fashioned ideas for the lyrics;
>>
>> it sounds *distant* in a way that compliments the theme of the lyrics (I
>> don't know how to do this bit), and;
>>
>> it's *continuous*, so that the whole recording (or its two halves) unfold
>> as a whole, whether the tracks are actually run into each other or just
>> linked by electronic interludes. So write with a mind on flow and sequence.
>> (Again, note Kyuss's suites on _Sky Valley_.)
>>
>> None of these are logistically impossible to achieve, or even that
>> expensive surely; it just takes a certain amount of guts and perversity to
>> compose that way, I guess. And, of course, you have to be a good enough
>> musician and composer to do it at all!
>>
>>
>>  Whether it is "really Hawkwind" or not doesn't concern me so much as
>>> whether it's really any good.
>>>
>>
>>        I agree. On that score I would say that the BotE studio disc is
>> `all right' but probably not `good', and that the live disc is `good' to
>> `very good'. Yours,
>>                    Jon
>>
>>
>> --
>>      Jonathan Jarrett, Oxford       jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
>>   =======================================================================
>>  "With Capitalism, man exploits man.  With Socialism, it is exactly
>> opposite"
>>                         -Robert Anton Wilson
>>
>
>