When desert rock meets psych
The good people at Ripple Music give us a lot to be grateful for (as we’ve said a million times on the site they released the Stone Axe albums for goodness sake!) and Lord knows a hell of a lot of what gets reviewed on here every day comes from their stable. But there’s one thing they are superb at that often gets overlooked. They are brilliant at giving worldwide releases to things that just wouldn’t have seen the light of day to any huge degree without their help.
This superb seven tracker is a case in point. Salem’s Bend got together in 2014 to make the thing, and they stuck it out on their Bandcamp page late last year. From there it caught the ears of someone, somewhere at California’s premiere purveyor of pleasing pieces, and now it gets the full Worldwide treatment it deserves.
It’s easy to see why it made an impression. The trio burst out of the blocks and come out swinging to the cheap seats with “Balshazzar” which pulses and throbs like prime Kyuss, does fuzzy, yet screeching, guitar extremely well and there is decent hook and a harmony too, but Salem’s Bend have a little more to offer than the conventional.
Because you are just as likely to find them in psychedelic headspace as you are in a bluesy, stoner, or doom one. These boys have the full range of tools in their kit bag. After starting off all good and bluesy, “Queen Of The Desert” gets positively dreamy in its verses, but as if to prove a point, kicks some serious ass in its chorus and any band who sticks an instrumental in as early into a debut album as SB do with the hypnotic groove of “Silverstruck” very obviously doesn’t possess the rulebook.
And with that the cat is very much out of the bag, and you are just as likely to find them getting trippy as riffing like Sabbath. Sometimes, like on “Losing Sleep” they do both, while others “Like Sun And Mist” – with its positively funky bass lick from four stringer Kevin (like Cher these cats don’t need a last name) are more expansive, and you can bet your life that “Mighty Caravan” with its Eastern flavour giving it a Led Zep-ish groove, would be a mighty jam – in all senses of the word – live.
The trap these songs avoid that others often fall into is that while they’ll happily meander and go around all kinds of houses (of the holy and otherwise) to make a point, they are never too long. “A Tip Of Salem” is a case in point. It packs a whole load of twists and turns in, but is only just over six minutes – and that is as epic as anything here gets.
A confident, classy and superior work from Salem’s Bend and indeed it is worth noting that although this a debut for this outfit, the three men playing this are all veterans of other bands. That experience shines through, and there is much to enjoy here as we all benefit from the Ripple effect.
Rating 8/10
