Pinnick Gales Pridgen - Pinnick Gales Pridgen

Trust me, I didn't start this blog intending for it to be a catalog for all of dUg Pinnick's various side projects - it just happened. Today's example is the debut album from - you guessed it - supergroup Pinnick Gales Pridgen, a - you guessed it - an outfit specializing in hard // psychedelic rock, blues, and funk. Pinnick is well within his weelhouse here alongside guitarist Eric Gales (who plays guitar upside-down a la Hendrix, as does Pinnick) and ex-Mars Volta stickman Thomas Pridgen: Pinnick Gales Pridgen is an hour-plus long buffet of blues rock goodness that covers everything from instrumentals to ballads, but the wide breadth of material contained here makes for a record that feels less than the some of its parts at times.

Opening cuts "Collateral Damage" and "Angels and Aliens" start get the sled moving at a brisk pace, with Gales' tastefully biting licks finding a natural partner in Pinnick's all-encompassing backup harmonies. A short interlude, "For Jasmine", gives us a breather as we dive into the album proper: "Wishing Well"' and "Hate Crime" simply ooze dUg with their impassioned delivery and slow rolling riffs, "Been So High (The Only Place To Go Is Down)" is over ten minutes of honest to God Delta blues and Gales' playing continues to impress on "The Greatest Love" and the album's lone cover "Sunshine of Your Love". Pridgen keeps up with his bandmates but his playing on this record seems more locked in with the groove than above it - certainly not a bad thing given the material. Speaking of, PGP isn't something for those lacking in time: the runtime tops out in the 70 minute range and there are only 2 tracks flying in under 4 minutes, which prove to make this album less of a pleasure than it should be. The boys take plenty of time to wring these songs of every drop they can, which has the side effect of making PGP drag its feet in places, particularly the back 9: "Black Jeans" could be half as long as it is with no lost love, but and "Angels and Aliens" and "Hang On, Big Brother" might've benefited from some trimming as well. As it stands, though, Pinnick Gales Pridgen is much more good than bad as nearly every song stands out on its own as a well-crafted rock song. Long in the tooth but certainly worth keeping in rotation.

C+

Vektor // Haken

Possibly the most hotly anticipated release of the year, Arizona-based Vektor has quickly ascended to the top of the rethrash heap, fueled by their deep space flavored blend of blackened prog-death-thrash. Terminal Redux fills its disc up with a hefty runtime of 73:21, offering these boys plenty of rope to hang themselves with only for them to burn down the gallows and piss on the ashes: Vektor's engines are burning at full power from the opening crush of "Charging the Void" and they don't let up for a good 40 minutes before we get a respite with the cosmic melancholy of "Collapse" before burning up in the atmosphere with "Recharging the Void". Crafty writing ensures that you're never more than a couple of minutes away from a more melodic passage to snap things back on course while nearly every song has something special to demarcate it: from the planet-sized groove of "Pteropticon", "Pillars of Sand"'s careening bleakness, to the chunky sci-fi of "Psychotropia" nearly every song contributes to the album's narrative while standing out as fantastic blackened thrash in it's own right. Add a dash of spaced-out choir vocals on the bookend tracks and you have Peter Watts in space - a heady twist of the depressing limits of human life mixed with the untold possibilities of the cosmos.

B+

I can't remember the last time I flip flopped my opinion on an album this hard. Upon it's release I considered Affinity one of Haken's least interesting works, featuring boring songwriting and flat production - pretty much the opposite of what I consider it to be at this point. I do still have some problems with the production, but it wasn't enough to keep this album from basically living in my car the last 2 months. While it doesn't quite reach the same heights as The Mountain did it comes damn close: "1985", "Earthrise", "Lapse", and "Bound by Gravity" are all absolute gems and even at the low points ("Initiate", "The Endless Knot") the album flows by a noticeably faster pace than their previous work, making for a 61 minute-long album that seems much shorter than it should. Well-layered lyrics paint a vibrant picture of the rise of artificial intelligence, the arcane workings of the human mind, and the aftermath of the sun's eventual death, while some of the band's most focused and powerful songwriting and album design (credit goes to the fantastic Blacklake Design for knocking this out of the park just as hard as they did The Mountain) seals the deal. Affinity proves that The Mountain wasn't just a fluke as the band moves forward, each album stronger than the last, into the future.

B+

Ty Tabor - Naomi's Solar Pumpkin / Moonflower Lane

Striking out on his own first among his bandmates, guitarist Ty Tabor's first solo release quietly released via mail order to fan club members in 1996 stands tall next to his longtime partner dUg Pinnick's initial solo offering, Massive Grooves..., as a concentrated shot of all the things Tabor fans would want: a laid back atmosphere, Beatles-esque vocals (John Lennon in Ty's case), and his distinctively sinuous guitar playing, and Naomi's Solar Pumpkin succeeds in delivering just that.

Like Massive Grooves, there's a novelty to hearing so much of someone's writing and playing that's normally balanced out with two others on early solo albums to help cover the spread of any songwriting deficiencies and to keep the memory of any clunkers overly rosy. I think that, on the whole, Ty is a better composer and writer than anyone else in King's X and it especially shows on his first two solo albums (Moonflower Lane is basically Naomi's Solar Pumpkin Remastered): alternating between understated foot-tappers like "I Know Everything", "Had to Move", "Boy to Man" and "Hollow Eyes" and layered ballad-type pieces in "Without You", "That's All", and "Walk With My Love", Tabor displays a level of competence at power-pop that is rarely seen. Handling all instruments himself and keeping the runtime tight, Tabor produces an excellent little piece of melodic hard rock.

B+