New records from Aquarius.

Available now at Edicola.

Here is the AQ review.

More to come!

WHITE HILLS  Frying On This Rock

The latest full length from these East Coast psychedelic space rockers and long time aQ faves find the band at their most rocking, trading in some of their soaring heart-of-the-sun blissed out psych jams for something a bit more Stooges-y, launching right into it with "Pads Of Light" which is definitely their most overtly hard rocking, channeling Loop and Spacemen 3 as much as Hawkwind, the pounding riff heavy churn still wreathed in swaths of celestial effects and underpinned by multiple layers of guitars, the song a seemingly simple three chord pound, but the production is massive, and the song offers up super melodic refrains, some gorgeously melodic basslines, and a second half that's all wild cosmic shred, soaring melodies, soft squalls of psych guitar tangle and more swooshing effects, on past records it might have stretched out for 10 more minutes, but here the band wind it down after just four. But fear not, the follow up "Robot Stomp" is a sprawling 12 minutes, a slow burn smoldering chug through clouds of shimmer and buried voices, some serious mesmerizing hypno-psych krautdrone mesmer, we kept expecting he song to explode into another part, but the band stay locked tight, letting the groove unwind slowly and druggily, the surrounding sounds getting more and more active, swirls of effects, warped woozy melodies, bombarded by squelches and glitches and lazer like bleeps and bloops, not to mention soaring string like synths, super dramatic and tense and intense, which leads directly into another rocker, the relatively brief "You Dream You See", which swaggers and slithers, the guitars thick and warm, the drums dense and tribal, laced with blasts of psych guitar freakout, finally, slipping into some abstract spaced out psychedelic drift for the last half of the song, another part that could easily have stretched out for two or three times as long.
"Song Of Everything" manages to merge the two sides of the band perfectly, the droned out psychedelic hypnorock, and the urgent riff heavy hard rock, the band slipping seamlessly between the two, before collapsing into a weird sort of abstract outer space drift, laced with spidery tendrils of melody, shards of wah wah, processed vox, spoken, and slowed down, super trippy and far out, before finally exploding into a final minute of chugging, churning psychedelic hard rock riffing.
And finally, the record closes with the awesomely titled "I Write A Thousand Letters Pulp On Bone", a hazy, woozy, dreamily druggy single part, repeated over and over, the listener sucked in and sent spinning into the ether, a cool super dynamic drum part, soaring swells of shimmery synth, while all around guitar and effects whirl and swirl and drift, definitely the sort of thing we could listen to forever, and the perfect finish, a sort of chill out, come down droned out psychedelic coda, that does get heavier and heavier, but also seems to get further and further out, and takes us willingly with it. Needless to say, absolutely recommended. And while we're tempted to say this might be the best White Hills yet, let's just say it's another fantastic record from a band whose given us pretty much nothing but fantastic records.