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White Hills, "Frying on this Rock"
This album is hailed as boasting the most energetic and concise songs of White Hills' career, which seems like a very ill-advised direction for the band to take, given that they are not a band known for great songcraft.  I look to them solely for drugged-out, guitar-worship excess—trying to be direct and hard-hitting does not suit them at all.  Fortunately, they still balance their punchier songs with several prolonged, space-y freakouts.  When those avoid sinking into self-parodying extremes, they can be absolutely brilliant.  I just wish that there were fewer uneven, underwhelming, and frustrating moments between them.
The album kicks off with one of the aforementioned short, hard-hitting songs, "Pads of Light."  Notably, I almost put the word "songs" in ironic quotes in this case, because this particular piece is extremely illustrative of why that direction is such a very bad idea.  Stylistically, "Pads" recalls Hawkwind's more metal leanings, but there is almost zero content: bassist Ego Sensation and drummer Nick Name whip up some rumbling, visceral power, but the song is essentially just Dave W. raspily howling "(something unintelligible)...on pads of light!" over some very dull and grindingly repetitive power chords.  Near the end, Dave thankfully erupts into a pretty cool guitar solo, but the rest of the song is just basically a wait for that to happen.  The whole thing sounds like it could have easily been made up on the spot.  "You Dream You See" later follows a similar template, but does so much more successfully, locking into a snarl-heavy, head-bobbing groove and culminating in a pretty unhinged guitar and synth freak-out.
Unfortunately, the album hits another spectacular low point in the opposite direction with "Song of Everything."  I want to scream every time I hear it, as it comes so close to being an absolutely classic White Hills song: it has a heavy riff, a propulsive groove, wild drumming, some neat psychedelic textures and flourishes, a lengthy wah-wah and spoken word interlude–pretty much everything I could possibly hope for.  Unfortunately, it also has some of the worst, most cliched lyrics in recent memory.  Initially, it seemed like the repeated howled "spread your wings and fly!" part was as bad as it could get, but then the languid and echo-heavy midsection sounded exactly like being trapped at a party by a college freshman that has just discovered acid ("open your miiiind!").  Once Dave dropped that philosophy on me, it became impossible to take the song at all seriously, no matter how fiercely they roared back.
Thankfully, the rest of the album mostly manages to avoid the dual pitfalls of attempted songcraft and overly earnest lysergic exhortations to free my mind and surrender to the cosmos.  White Hills are at their best when Dave just lets his guitar do his communicating for him and doesn't worry about trying to craft any catchy hooks.  As a result, the two lengthiest and most structurally simplistic pieces ("Robot Stomp"
and "I Write A Thousand Letters") are probably the best.  "Letters" is the sort of piece that probably shouldn't work at all, as the whole thing basically sounds a 14-minute-long outro with no substantial development of any kind.  Rhythmically and melodically, it almost sounds like a locked groove, which unexpectedly turns out to be a mesmerizing enough foundation to suck me deeply into all the tripped-out synth noises and heavily processed guitar pyrotechnics that unfold throughout.  The 12-minute "Robot Stomp" is even better still, holding down a throbbing motorik groove beneath a hazy of strange sounds and chattering voices and allowing far more dynamic variation and passing dissonance. In fact, the longer it goes on the crazier and more far out it goes–it may be the best single piece that White Hills have ever recorded.
I think that the problem with White Hills might be that they don't realize quite what it is that they do brilliantly (muscular, deranged, long-form psychedelic instrumentals).  That seems to be the only explanation for why something as weird, wonderful, and chaotic as "Robot Stomp" could possibly wind up on the same album as the lead-footed, reheated Hawkwind of "Pads of Light."  The latter might be accessible enough to lure in some more fans, yet it seems so bland, heavy-handed, and regressive when contrasted with the album's highlights.  Frying on this Rock is not exactly a misstep, as Dave W. and company have eliminated some of the bloat that characterized H-p1 and unveiled a couple of pieces that show a dramatic, inspired evolution, but they continue to be a bit too schizophrenic, inconsistent, and prone to wince-inducing lyrics for me to fully embrace.
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