Brujas Del Sol album stream

A little while back Brujas Del Sol's 'Moonliner' album was featured on this blog, as Devouter Records were cool enough to let me hear it a bit early (read the review here) (I also wrote about the album on the terrific Stoner Hive blog which you can read here).  It's a six song collection of spacey droney psych wandering in the realm of Spacemen 3's more epic moments.  Today is the big day that 'Moonliner' is being released, you can now stream the album in it's entirety at the soundcloud link directly below.  From Devouter Records:

https://soundcloud.com/devouter-records/sets/brujas-del-sol-moonliner




Devouter Records are proud to present the release of Moonliner by Columbus quartet Brujas del Sol. Out digitally and on coloured vinyl on April 15th.

Moonliner

Brujas del Sol is a psychedelic quartet that focuses their attention toward fuzzed out, loud, swirly, droney compositions.
Old bandmates Adrian Zambrano (guitar, vocals) and Derrick White (bass) formed Brujas del Sol with drummer Jason Green in the fall of 2011. Instead of pre-writing songs, the band took a more organic approach; recording every improvised jam session. After a few months, hours of musical ideas were captured. Listening back, the band picked a couple of favourites which became their first songs. A variety of musical ingredients began to melt into a sound of their own; hypnotic krautrock, fuzz-laden blues grooves, swirling surf-rock, ambient drones all found their ways into songs. 

During the spring of 2012 the band hit Electraplay Studios which yielded two EPs-Moonliner volumes 1 & 2. As the writing process became more demanding, the band wanted to add a keyboardist. Ryan Stivers joined that summer and the band went forth composing music for the last installation in their Moonliner trilogy. 

While spending most of the summer writing and opening for national acts A Place to Bury Strangers and Black moth super rainbow, Moonliner volume 3 was recorded and finally released December of 2012. After reworking Vol.’s 1 and 2, several favorable reviews and countless hours of honing and refining their craft, the band is poised to bring to you The Moonliner LP.

During the course of 2012 the band recorded three separate volumes of the Moonliner series releasing them on their bandcamp page to raise awareness of band.  The three volumes were then re-recorded at the end of 2012 with the addition of new member of keyboards for release through Devouter Records.

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http://www.facebook.com/BrujasdelSol

Buy the album here:http://devouterrecords.bigcartel.com/

The Alchemical Mixture - Brujas Del Sol & Early Mammal (album reviews)

DEVOUTER RECORDS EDITION

Brujas Del Sol - Moonliner

Highlights include: "Conquistadors" and "Baba Yaga".

From: Columbus, Ohio.  Rating: 3/5

BRUJAS DEL SOL - Moonliner

If there were a band today that has been featured on this blog that takes the otherworldly aspects of psychedelic music and stretches them out to cosmis proportions, it's Brujas Del Sol.  Velvet snow falls from cloudless purple skies onto a sea of trees waving breezelessly in the airless void of some distant moon.  These are the dulcit tones of 'Moonliner'.

This LP, soon to be released on Devouter Records, is a compilation of sorts.  A collection of the group's singles which shouldn't work to create a solid and coherent listening experience but does.

Psychedelic drone is the band's drug of choice and they would have the listener nearly overdosing on repetition.  Long stretched out grooves test the tensile strength of some of these compositions nearly to the breaking point.  The best analogy to make on this front would be that the band take the role of Sheherazad of the Arabian Nights, never able to finish telling her story upon fear of death, digging in for an endless story cycle that tells no overall story but doesn't need to.  The art is in the telling.

The particular brand of psychedelia that Brujas Del Sol produce is not missionary music, the dreamy often ethereal and long-winded passages are successful in just having taken place.  Once the proper groove has been found the band pin their ears back and just keep going, battening down the hatches, hammering their point home with casual ease.

With that as a starting point, there are definitely moments of downright catchiness, such as "Conquistadors", "Baba Yaga" and "Satanic Surf Girls ..." as tracks to look out for in particular.  On these, fuzz rock, alt rock and even surf rock all in their turns become the beacons which bring the band's psychedelic ship into harbor.

Early Mammal - Horror At Pleasure

Highlights include: "Money Shot" and "Resurrection 

Men".  From: London, England.  Rating: 3.5/5

EARLY MAMMAL - Horror At Pleasure

Early Mammal take psychedelic rock, drag it by its patchouli greased dreds through the dark woods at night, shotgun in tow.  Through black masses and repeated animal sacrifice the band slowly convinces their victim of the righteousness of their actions until a Stockholm syndrome is developed.  Dark psychedelic music then springs fully armored from the forehead of Early Mammal and it's called 'Horror at Pleasure', an apt title indeed.

I can't tell you what it is for sure about this album and the music contained herein, but there's a major occult vibe going on.  It jumps out at you like a skeleton leaps from a closet when least expected.  Occult may or may not be hitting the mark because the vocals are hard to discern at times (more on this later), but there is a dangerous vibe to this album.  It drips with rock n' roll danger.  It's a darkness that goes way beyond dressing in black, turning crosses upside down and playing downtuned.  This is what conservative parents of the 1950's and 1960's were afraid rock music would turn into.  A snarling, smirking, hyper-sexualized beast of mind-expanding / mind-destroying melodic noise.  Early Mammal are the Rolling Stones transposed as youngsters to the punk era and possessed by taloned devils.

Take instrumental number "Checking The Bullshitter's Queen" for example.  "What does that even mean?" the conservative parents would ask and the music would be like, "if you don't get it now you never will."  The music explodes into ever more esoteric territory the further into the album one goes, the band skipping from long instrumental segment to long instrumental segment, cracking many a skull and taking many a name along the way.  A whole world of sounds is their stomping ground and Early Mammal stride long, their reach is wide, conquering vast tracts of territory as they go.

It's apparent that Early Mammal took great care to develop this album as a cohesive whole with a distinctive voice lent to songs linked by instrumental interludes and that fade in and out atop one another.  In this way 'Horror At Pleasure' is a satisfying listening experience that never jars the listener out of its dark world.

The mixing of this album leaves a bit to be desired with the guitar dominating to the detriment of the vocals which are often buried beneath layers of effects, but for the most part at the very least the melody carries through.  In the end the obscurity of the vocals only adds to the dark and dangerous depravity of Early Mammal's 'Horror At Pleasure'.

Genre: Psychedelic, Stoner

Release Date: April 1, 2013 (Early Mammal); April 15, 2013 (Brujas Del Sol)

Suggested listening activity for fellow non-stoners: Go to a gravel pit at night, pretend it's the moon and howl at the earth.

Better Reviews:
Stoner Hive Brujas Del Sol review
Heavy Planet Early Mammal review
Stoner Hive Early Mammal review



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