Savage Summer Sun captures two live shows on back-to-back days in March during their Spring West Coast tour. I heard great things about this tour, but I heard just as much about the great West Coast opening acts, Skaters and Axolotl, as I heard about the East Coast touring acts, Mouthus and Double Leopards. Double Leopards must have been similarly enthusiastic about the West Coast contingent, as they invited Skaters to tour the East Coast with them - a tour that is going on right now.
Before opening up the CD, the natural question is, why wasn't this done as an LP with one show on each side? However each recording is about 37 minutes long, and to cut them down would have been a disservice, as the building up and tearing down of the group's sound is one of the most interesting parts of this release and something you don't always get from their studio recordings.
The first recording is from the March 22nd show at Il Corral in Los Angeles. The Far East (the hemisphere of the world, not the coast of the US) treats music as a living, breathing entity. Creating music is less about technical execution as much as it is connecting as a group and giving life to something metaphysical, and this style of music creation, in the spirit of Taj Mahal Travellers, is captured excellently in this first show's recording. You get a great sense of the band coming together, starting with a few bellows of guitar feedback and a whirring bit of distortion, which slowly builds into a swarm of locusts. The dissolution is interesting too, as processed vocals cause all the instruments to drop out, leaving just hand drums and a few eeks and irrs. While it's a very interesting show, it's not a very effective drone; it's just a big whoosh. Despite some subtle added texture, once it reaches its apex, it's somewhat monotonous. Having listened to this track a half dozen times, I haven't gotten lost in it yet.
The next day's show, a radio performance on KDVS of Davis, California, is a much better drone; it's positively overpowering. Distorted guitar is thrown through another layer of distortion, and then another, creating a dizzying siren call that floats around digital satellite blips and harshly distorted radio signals. My sinuses block up, and my head feels light. As one layer of distortion drops open, leaving some room to breathe, the guitar becomes a spinning maelstrom, sucking in energy, building back up again in power, but burning out quickly like a supernova. After it burns out, we're left to recover in a ten minute long bath of roughly textured digital distortion, the temperature building to a nice warmth with an added swell of processed vocals.
