Blind Roots - Gully Sun

Blind Roots

Gully Sun
self-released; 2015

3.9 out of 5

By J Simpson

Imagine: A fog rolls a Mesozoic landscape. In the distance, a hollow thud resonates. Are they sacrificial drums? Or the approaching stride of a behemoth? Just as your blood runs cold, and you begin to call upon whatever savior you can find, the fog turns lilac and lavender; there's a break in the clouds, and all feelings of ominousness dissolve. This is a complicated ecosystem, for sure. 

For the longest time, anything DOOM-related - the bastard mutant progeny of Black Sabbath's half step downtempo crawl - was automatically associated with all that is grim, unholy and unwholesome, conjuring images of inverted crosses, gore-splattered B-grade horror films, full of witches and warlocks, goats, demons and all cast in a uniform black and white. 

Like most genres, in this brave new century we are living in, these associations have grown more layered and complex with the omnipresent availability of music spanning time and space. The monolithic dirge of DOOM rock/metal is still there, dour and grim as ever but it mixes and mingles with other styles and genres making for amusing and confusing mental imagery, like bong rips in Mayan jungles or pagan altars in outer space. 

In the case of Gully Sun by Blind Roots this can be seen from a devotion to Sabbath, as well as Jimi Hendrix and his Experience. And while merging genres is not entirely a revelation, the mixture of worldviews can be revealing, indeed. 
DOOM, as the name indicates, suggests a misanthropic outlook, being rooted in the horrific traditions of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. But Hendrix was a humanist, a futurist - dreaming of what life would be like, when we could breathe underwater. It's not as much of a contradiction as you might think. 

Blind Roots remind us that many of us LIKE the horrific, the imaginative, the fantastic. This is slo-mo sludge metal for prehistoric adventure, for zero gravity exploration. It's like standing in some desolate marsh, and watching sterling and chrome high rises shoot out like mutant weeds in time-lapsed photography. Gully Sun is a breath of fresh crypt air in a metal scene that is too often polished and airbrushed like some heathen boyband. A lot of us like metal that is raw, real, uncompromising, as can be heard from the infernal regions issuing static-y missives, straight to cassette. 

Gully Sun was recorded live, in one morning and mastered in one more sitting. The sound can be a bit muffled, a bit rawer than what the average radio listener might be used to, but you'd be well advised to peer through the murk if you happen to like Kyuss, Hawkwind, Voivoid, etc. 

Gully Sun grows on you more and more, the more you listen, like moss on some forgotten statue. I wish all metal could be this real and this imaginative. 

Become A Fan

bandcamp

Tweet