COSMIC PRIESTESS

The most recent record of this heavy American acid rock group reaches to even further heights in spontaneous psychedelic rock impressionism. "Slave Cylinder" kicks in straightforwardly to the hazy maelstrom. Heavy riff cycles are relieved by faster opening of the rhythm and powerful Cream reminding guitar solos. "Sand, Stone and Pearl" are firstly discovered with more tender observations from shores of misty nocturnal sea. After swimming to the open sea, vibrating tones and marimbas enrich the tonal palette, ensuring pleasant content to relentlessly rolling waves of sound. Fade-out solutions might be seen as minor flaws on this disc, which culminates to the over half-hour long psychic destroyer "Saturn Missile Battery". On this epic stoner wandering I especially liked how the building of rhythm is left mostly to the drums, guitars focusing mostly to melodic territories, and thus escaping the usual riff-oriented sludge metal solutions. This also strengthens the vintage associations, when comparing the album to outputs of many other current psychedelic heavy bands. The album closer is a more relaxed and casual psych-rocker in vein of Jimi Hendrix's "Driving South" rocker.

It has often fascinated me how to get out most of the potential from basic rock trio without singing and conventional pop song's arrangements and compositional elements. This band brings one answer to my searches among with the Earthless, however here with even lesser associations left relating to the post 1970's heavy metal sound manners. So, in my opinion a really beautiful aggressive acid rock band, which evolvement both in quality and stylistically are evidently preserved to their discography, this album from it being my current personal favorite of those which I have heard. I personally felt that the spontaneous psychedelia borne from the dirty streets has elevated to more divine states, like the name and album cover also suggests. I would strongly recommended this to the fans of open heavy psych improvisations, carrying forth the torch lit on the concert stages of Hendrix and Clapton in the late 1960's.