SHOWS earthless, featured, jjuujjuu, Kikagaku Moyo, mad alchemy, psych rock, teragram ballroom Rob Shepyer March 7, 2018 0 Comments

Earthless Liquified My Face At The Teragram

I had heard about Earthless forever ago but because of my natural skepticism, I didn’t really feel any need to see an instrumental band that wasn’t some kind of post rock outfit. Then after I heard Bill Burr raving about how incredible Earthless were live, I got about a guzzler’s gallon of fuel put in my engine to go see the band. Fast forward to last week when Dillon told me about the show, and I finally caved and decided to dive in, head-first. And boy was I ever glad to have caved and dived in.

This was my first legitimate psych rock show, I know admitting that probably decimates any shred of credibility I had left but it’s true. I was always into the more extreme side of music and then also as a contrarian, seeing everyone in LA get so wrapped up in the whole Desert Daze scene probably made me want to avoid it. I’m not gonna be shopping for bellbottoms at vintage stores anytime soon, but maybe I’ll pop into more psych shows. I dressed in a “Canadian tuxedo” just to fit in at this show and I wasn’t the only one. All that said, Earthless is as psychedelic as an instrumental hard rock/metal band gets.

JJUUJUU, Phil Pirrone’s psych rock collective experiment, was the first opener of the night. You might know the man from the festival he created to satiate this rising psych rock movement, Desert Daze. He’s a sort of king in sage’s robes.

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Earthless is about to release an album called Black Heaven on March 16th by Nuclear Blast. And with an album title and record label like that, one must make the distinction that this is a fuckin’ metal band. It’s as metal as it gets. It may not be as speed or death obsessed as the genre’s contemporaries but if you look at the roots of metal, all the way back to Sabbath and Zeppelin, you can see Earthless as a direct descendent.

The entire set was one whole musical life-line, I don’t think there was a single pause in the entire show. People fled out the Teragram, feeling sick, possibly deafened. These same people would probably cower into the fetal position or try flying off a roof if ever dosed with acid in their warm morning milk. This non-stop attack on the boundaries of my thought loosened up the reducing valve that constricts all my senses and suddenly, it all became clear to me: Aliens, God, the building of the pyramids, the mysteries of the universe, the Teragram was buzzing with life’s beauty. I had thought the band was going to play an entirely instrumental set, which would have been fine because their music speaks louder than words, but once again, my expectations had failed me and Isaiah Mitchell belted out some vocals to change it up for one song. Sometimes reserving vocals for just one song makes it mean more.

It felt like we were inside a lava lamp abut to burst open. Then once the set was finished, we burst out of the Teragram and bled onto 7th street, still euphoric as if after a good trip.