The title couldn't be more appropriate for this album: the band's work has always seemed to come out of a smoky, hallucinogenic haze, and this collection of rare and unreleased tracks demonstrates this clearly. The sound is an odd mix of 1960s psych tinged rock with some of the more current attention to drone and noise that works extremely well.
The disc opens and ends with two distinctly different takes on the same track, "In The Back." The opening studio cut is heavily propelled by overdriven bass leads and pounding drums that put it alongside the likes of Skullflower and Ramleh in their heydays, and the screamed vocals don't hurt either. The live cut is even rawer sonically, but puts the focus on flanged and phased effects rather than the distortion, propelling it more into multicolored space as opposed to the grimy earth tones of the studio track.
Some of the other tracks are far less commanding, "Luck" channels a vibe consistent with Nico era Velvet Underground with its glacial pace, fuzzy organ, what may be a clarinet and disconnected, paranoid vocals. "Growth" goes more into abstract space, drums are used as a general instrument rather than as a rhythm, and there are massive slabs of wide open space that are akin to the more out there moments of Kraut Rock than anything else. Other tracks are pure 1960s psych rock, both "Everything Happens Twice" and "The Sun" feature organ leads that are pretty reminiscent of the Doors without the pretense and the suck.
Even jazz gets a nod in the two part "Twelve Bottles and One White Cone," an extended improvisation that features organ being used in ways not intended by the designer alongside a skuzzy bass lead and jazz tinged percussion section that is in league with fusion era Miles Davis, except filtered through weed and inhalants instead of heroin. Even though the tracks differ from one to another, they all do have that blunted, smoky quality to them that just feels as if some chemicals were partaken in during their recording.
Religious Knives take the approach to drone more in a sense of repetition: most of the tracks on this album clock in the eight to nine minute range and meander somewhat in their repeated motifs, but never to a level of boredom but instead remains more hypnotic than anything else. For such a young band they are already establishing their own niche in a market that has been flooded with too many sub-par Wolf Eyes clones and Sunn O))) pretenders that this is something both fresh and invigorating.
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