With a name like Mystic Sons and artwork that looks like a PCP-fueled nightmare drawn by Rob Zombie, there are few prizes for guessing the style of music in which the band indulge. Offering a hyper-fuzzed blues that threatens to tear the fabric of your speakers, the Martigny-based band are a three piece who revel in their tinnitus-inducing sounds and this self-titled effort, offers up seven tracks that threaten a contact high with over-exposure.
Kicking off with the instrumental intro, the band recall a youthful Karma to Burn with plenty of Sleep thrown in for good measure. Bochat’s guitars fizz and burn, the mire of fuzz occasionally clearing enough to allow a solo to make a bid for freedom, whilst Tibo and Cagoule (drums and bass respectively) lay down a rock solid foundation below. It’s nothing, however, compared to the full-blown, doom-infused might of Mephistopheles, which sees Bochat unleash a sand-scarred roar that is straight out of the Kyuss instruction manual. Hallucinatory desert-rock, Mephistopheles is effortlessly cool and the band pack a mean groove. Next up, the band evoke their spiritual home with Californian Desert, a groovy slab of retro-rock washed in a haze of reverb and left to stew in the water of a thousand bongs. It’s awesome at the outset and even more so when the whole thing coalesces into one glorious, neck-snapping groove. Hell, just put this track on repeat for about a year and tell me you don’t love this band at the end. A bluesier track, Leather Apron features a bravura vocal performance from Bochat, who roars and wails with the passion of an evangelical preacher.
Not a Rolling Stones cover as expected, brown sugar turns out to be a seven-minute exercise in space rock with woozy leads and a trippy dynamic that lurches like a festival-goer pumped full of ketamine and roaming the mosh-pit. A short, heavy blast of pure rock fury, Save your soul is like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club on steroids, with a wailing vocal and a pummelling riff, before the epic black ritual closes out the album on a hard-rock trip, all sand-blasted riffs and whiskey-soaked vocals with a bluesy vibe that suddenly devolves into a wide-eyed desert jam – the sort of thing Neil Young might have indulged in back in the days when he and Crazy Horse would extend cowgirl in the sand to nearly half an hour in length. It’s the perfect end to a pretty much perfect record.
Great artwork (Amelie Avril and Michael Jousson), great production (Jan Saunier) and great songs… what more do you want? Mystic sons take the listener on a wild journey, banishing the outside world and evoking the vast open spaces of the Californian Desert. This is literally flawless, and anyone who digs stoner rock should be falling over themselves to get a copy of this absolute gem. 10
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