Blog On The Motorway Swan diving off the tongues of crippled giants

Cross Blogination 10: Kyuss – Welcome to Sky Valley.

Cross Blogination is a project I’m doing with twitterthon hero Diary Of A Ledger, the idea being every week one of us will recommend to the other one of our all time favourite albums, which we will then both write a review for. Then every third week we review a suggestion from you lovely people. Or at least, that was how it was working, until I took on far too much stuff and we went over two months without doing it. But thank the fictional man in the sky of your choice, because we are back, and because it's my choice, and it's a belter.

Josh Homme. You probably know him as the guy from Queens of the Stone Age. Or maybe you know him as that fella who is not as famous as the other two guys from Them Crooked Vultures. But to me, he will always be that Ginger Elvis guitar player from the greatest Stoner band to ever have lived, Kyuss.

I got this album on the recommendation of Kerrang! Magazine, back in the day when you actually used to do things like recommend old albums that are awesome, rather than touting the new emo boyband. I was on holiday and bored, so I went to HMV and purchased this, then went home to sit in the back garden with a book, and stuck my headphones in.

What was to assault my ears was to change my music tastes forever. Right from the start, when the riff from ‘Gardenia’ kicks in, nothing I had ever heard before could have prepared me for ‘that’ guitar sound, which was roughly akin to having treacle poured into my ears. Rich, warm, heavy as a motherfucker, I don’t think I’ve reacted so primally to album before or since. And that was even before the dulcet tones of John ‘The Voice’ Garcia swept over, with his stream of consciousness meandering lyrics.

But if the first song on this album is staggering in its excellence, it is nothing compared to the next two tracks. ‘Asteroid’ is a crushingly heavy instrumental that sees Josh Homme showing exactly why Kyuss fans will never be entirely satisfied with his subsequent output. Marrying Mogwai like subtlety to the biggest riff ever written, it’s like being battered around the head by a balloon filled with custard in a sensory deprivation tank. And track three, the excellently titled ‘Supa Scoopa And The Mighty Scoop’ brings back Garcia to what can only be described as the perfect distillation of Black Sabbath and the Doors, with false endings stretching out the joy to the point where you can’t help but giggle.

The album itself is structured as three separate acts, with these three tracks serving as the first. I could wax lyrical all day about the other seven tracks on offer here, but then I will be here all day. Safe to say that the quality never lets up here, from the punk fuzz of 100%, to the seven minute epic sprawl of ‘Space Cadet’ (seriously Josh, when was the last time you wrote something that good? Please do so again) where Josh and bassist Scott Reeder jam out something as close to perfection as makes no odds, to ‘Demon Cleaner’ which is a gloriously laid back fuzzed out pop song. Or the crushing weight of ‘Odyssey’s riff, or, well, pretty much the whole album.

If you’ve never heard Kyuss, but you like Queens of the Stone Age, or really any rock music, I beseech you to search this out, as well as the other Kyuss albums (well, maybe except Wretch, which is a bit shit in truth) and enter the collosally heavy world of Californian Stoner rock.  You wont regret it, and don't worry, you need take no substances to enjoy it properly (although if you are of that persuasion, this album gets ten times better still when you are high.)

Now, don't forget to go and see what Gray thinks of this!