CD Odyssey Disc 507: Kyuss

Need to make this review fast, because I have some guitar practice to get in before my actual lesson.  I did practice this week, but learning the guitar is a huge task, and there isn’t enough time in an ordinary day to do it right.

Disc 507 is…. …And the Circus Leaves Town

Artist: Kyuss

Year of Release: 1995

What’s up with the Cover?  When I first got this album, this cover confounded me.  It was like it was a reflection, but the whole thing just looked…wrong, from the snow on the ground to the angles of the reflection, to the horizon line.  Then I realized, it wasn’t just a picture with a reflection, it was a picture with a reflection upside-down.  Turn it upside down and you see that the ‘snow’ on the ground is actually the sky, and the ‘sky’ is actually water – the area is flooded.  All the perspective lines finally work as well.  Check it out:

Trippy, dude...

How I Came To Know It:  I had idly heard of Kyuss over the years, but it was my friend Nick that got me interested.  He had received a list of heavy bands from a guy in a local band (who played with our mutual friend, Kelly).  He had given Nick a list of some bands he liked, and Nick was at home one night trying out samples of them.  When he put on Kyuss I liked what I heard, so I went out and bought the “Blues for the Red Sun” album based on reviews that it was the band's best.  When I liked that, I bought this one as a follow up, which is how I roll.

How It Stacks Up:  Kyuss only had four albums and I only have the two I just mentioned.  Of the two, “Blues for the Red Sun” is the superior record, putting “…And the Circus Leaves Town” at number two.

Rating:  2 stars

What to think of a band named after an original Dungeons & Dragons monster?  I suppose they should be congratulated for letting their geek flag fly.  Kyuss is named after the D&D monster “Son of Kyuss” an zombie-like undead creature that is mostly known for having highly infectious worms crawling through its various skull holes.  Ugh.  How do I know this?  Let’s just say, I’ve got my own geek flag to fly.

Anyway, Kyuss is a stoner metal band (more on that later) that had a brief and relatively low key career in the early to mid-nineties which ended with “…And the Circus Leaves Town.”  True to their genre, this music is composed largely of repeating guitar riffs that are very easy to nod your head to and let your hippocampus take the driver's seat from your frontal lobes for a while.

“…And the Circus Leaves Town” feels strongly influenced by the grunge scene.  In fact, the first half of the song “El Rodeo” lifts its melody directly from Pearl Jam’s 1991 song “Black.”  I love “Black,” but the way it is used in “El Rodeo” makes it sound too carnival-like and self-absorbed.  The song only really gets going half-way through where it moves on to a heavy lick of its own.  It would be easy to criticize this kind of melody lifting, but I think Kyuss does something sufficiently different with it, even if I don’t particularly like how they handle it.

The influence goes beyond one song, and grunge is heard throughout the record in the fuzzy guitar production and angst-flavoured vocals.  The whole album is deliberately raw and clearly focused on sounding thick n’ heavy.  It generally suits the basic song construction, although at times the lack of sound separation made me feel like I was in a nightclub with bad sound.  I’d prefer it to be a little crisper, in the way Tool would handle the same material.

With their repetitive chords that slowly chukka-chukka your way into your cranium you could probably call this “groove metal” but with song titles like “Thee ‘Ol Boozeroony,” “Jumbo Blimp Jumbo” and “Tangy Zizzle” I think “stoner metal” is a much more appropriate description.  Whether any of these songs relate to their title is impossible to tell.  The first two are instrumentals and “Tangy Zizzle” is not about a new flavour of Doritos even though it clearly should be with a title like that.

The album is inoffensive overall, and the grooves are good enough, but the best three tracks are all packed at the front end of the record, with “Hurricane” and “One Inch Man” having particularly relentless guitar riffs that get your head bobbing.

Unfortunately the rest of the album doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain.  The songs are played very well, but there just wasn’t enough going on to engage my ear and the longer it went on the less interesting it became.

Of some note, Kyuss guitarist Josh Homme has gone on to be in two fairly memorable supergroups in recent years, “Queens of the Stone Age” (who I don’t dig) and “Them Crooked Vultures” (which I do) so kudos to him for keeping the music alive long after Kyuss finished putting out records.

As for “…And the Circus Leaves Town” it had its moments, and I have no serious complaints, but it didn’t blow me away.  I’m sticking with a modest two stars for this one, with the expectation that, when I finally get to it, “Blues for the Red Sun” will be measurably better.

Best tracks:  Hurricane, One Inch Man, Thee ‘Ol Boozeroony