France's Most Incredible Stoner Band
Slift play psychedelic space doom...trés, trés hurlant
Before we begin:
CD for sale! (Yes, again.) I have an extra copy of the new Art Ensemble of Chicago double live CD, The Sixth Decade — From Paris to Paris, Live at Sons D’Hiver, out now on RogueArt. brand new and still sealed. (I bought one, and before it arrived, they sent me a promo copy.) If you want it, I’ll sell it to you for $25 plus shipping, pretty much anywhere in the world. Drop me an email at burningambulance@gmail.com.
Roz Milner has a really nice writeup on The Sixth Decade; check it out here:
• Critic Rui Miguel Abreu named José Lencastre’s Inner Voices one of the 10 best Portuguese albums of 2022! (You can buy a copy on Bandcamp.)
• My latest Ugly Beauty column is up at Stereogum; I interviewed pianist Jason Moran about his new album From the Dancehall to the Battlefield, and reviewed a bunch of new records, including the Art Ensemble of Chicago album mentioned above.
• Guitarist Brandon Ross has a one-night-only, three-set event happening at Roulette this Friday, January 27. He’ll be performing with For Living Lovers (his duo project with bassist Stomu Takeishi); Phantom Station (with David Virelles on keyboards, Hardedge on sound design, Eric McPherson on drums, and Mauro Refosco on percussion and electronics); and with Breath Of Air (with Charlie Burnham on violin and Warren Benbow on drums)! If you’re in the NYC area, you can buy tickets here or watch a live stream on YouTube, and if you haven’t heard BoA’s amazing debut album, grab it from our Bandcamp page!
Stoner rock/stoner metal is not for everyone. Most of the time, it’s not for me. I don’t smoke weed, for one thing. So the music’s essential qualities — slow to mid-paced fuzz riffs, throbbing beats, lyrics mostly about subjects of interest to stoned people when they’re not simply about smoking weed — aren’t my favorites. But periodically, bands that fit under the stoner umbrella will catch my ear. I love Monster Magnet’s 1990s albums, especially Superjudge and Dopes to Infinity; I liked the first couple of Electric Wizard albums, until the limits of their imagination became clear; I like Fu Manchu; and the instrumental stoner jam trio Earthless are one of my favorite bands ever. (For the record, I don’t count High On Fire — who I love — as a stoner band. Sleep are a stoner band, and I don’t like them, but High On Fire are somewhere between Motörhead and Mastodon: pure metal warriors bestriding the wasteland.)
Anyway, the band this week’s newsletter is about, France’s Slift, are definitely a stoner band, but they’re way too smart to sing about weed. (Yes, they sing in English.) They’re a trio from Toulouse — brothers Jean and Rémi Fossat (guitar and bass, respectively) and drummer Canek Flores — who’ve released two albums, one EP and a couple of singles since 2017, and their music is a blend of ultra-heavy garage rock, retro space rock, and hard-edged psychedelia. At its best, it’s absolutely bludgeoning, but it’s also subtle and progressive — they take you on a journey.
Their first two releases, 2017’s Space is the Key and 2018’s La Planète Inexplorée, gave a good indication of what they could do. Sometimes the riffs were so blown-out you’d think they were High Rise or Mainliner or some other 1990s Japanese act, but then they’d get take it down a notch and throw in some subtle keyboards, while Flores kept the beat at a perfect, precise gallop, and they would sound like a New Wave band covering Deep Purple’s “Highway Star” or something.
Their masterpiece to date, though, is 2020’s Ummon. The album tells you what you’re getting into from your first glimpse of its amazing gatefold cover (above) by French comic artist Philippe “Caza” Cazaumayou, but you’re not really prepared for just how brain-blasting it is. The first two tracks, “Ummon” and “It’s Coming…”, are like being launched down a highway on some kind of Wile E. Coyote rocket sled and then suddenly finding yourself airborne, even breaking out of Earth’s atmosphere, as the unstoppably mighty riffs (and the swirling, disorienting drones underpinning them) and the thunderous beat all combine into a perfect storm of space-rockin’ cosmic fury. And the album’s energy never flags. Even on slower, driftier songs like “Citadel on a Satellite,” an absolute pile-driver of a riff will come slamming down on you like a walk-in freezer dropped off a roof, and then the band will be off, galloping toward the horizon again. These guys are set on maximum destruction all the time. Lemmy once told me that Hawkwind would lock the doors to venues where they played, and hit the already acid-damaged audience with so much raw volume and such an intense light show that they would basically melt into a puddle of flesh, gibbering in terror. I can easily imagine the Slift guys hearing that and saying, “Yep, sounds like a plan.”
Last year, Slift put out two releases, both of which are great. Levitation Sessions is a 70-minute live set filmed inside the ultra-high voltage electron microscope at the National Institute of Applied Sciences’s CEMES Laboratory in their hometown of Toulouse. I mean, that’s fucking genius. You can watch it above, and buy the audio on Bandcamp. The songs mostly come from Ummon (except for “Heavy Road” from La Planète Inexplorée), but they’re often radically lengthened — “Citadel on a Satellite” goes from 10 minutes to 15, and “Lions, Tigers and Bears” stretches from 13 minutes to 18. They also released a single, “Unseen”/“The Real Unseen,” via Sub Pop. The two tracks are halves of a single piece left over from the Ummon sessions. So think of them as bonus tracks if you like, but necessary ones.
Slift are one of the truly great heavy bands of the last half dozen years. Ummon and Levitation Sessions are masterpieces, up there with Hawkwind’s Doremi Fasol Latido and Space Ritual. Strap your helmet on and climb aboard their rocket.
That’s it for now. See you next week!