DIESTO

Good stoner rock/doom albums often have a way of slowly but surely overtaking the listener until you — at the risk of sounding terribly cheesy and cliché — become one with the album. Long trips down the existential highway in and of themselves accomplish nothing, except fatigue, earache, and dementia-inducing boredom. Seeing "God" standing next to a billboard advertising payday loans along way helps to divert one's attention in some cases, but when you are consciously counting miles and minutes, all of it becomes for naught. Segueing complete, you may now turn your attention to a 57-minute journey called DIESTO's "High as the Sun", which does indeed come packaged with high degrees of physiological takeover and journeys across figurative, picturesque southwestern deserts during which time is of anything but the essence.

But don't let me mislead you into thinking that "High as the Sun" is transcendental hippie drift with intermittent puffs of shoe-gaze smoke. It's really not that kind of animal, aside from the fact that the slow burns and dirty plods do have hypnotic qualities that, to revisit the original point, tend to ooze through the pours and chemically force submission. So yes, it is stoner-ish and it is doomy, but it is also a big fucking ball of rock. Consider HIGH ON FIRE melted down under intense heat to a slower, malleable form covered with MELVINS muck and periodically electro-shocked with — in a very general sense — UNSANE's distorted unreality. Then again, dig a little deeper and the detritus of ELECTRIC WIZARD and early NEUROSIS will occasionally float by.
"High as the Sun" is also much more than drone and it is in no way amorphous in composition. When the hypno-groove is running it is driven by a well written riff that sticks to the ribs. Quite often these six long tracks are considerably more dynamic than one-trick pony doom efforts. The mammoth title track is even catchy and perfectly incorporates three variations of vocal, including the KYUSS/SLEEP lead, the chant-like backings, and the harsh/crusty gut-wrench. That one alone will drag you out your bed and send you sleep walking through the neighbor's organic garden, singing that infectious refrain for the duration of the experience or until the police arrive. Some of you may even notice during parts of "Beyond the Graves" and "All Eyes Upon You" the type of swirling psychedelic dust storms that pervaded the most important album that MONSTER MAGNET ever made, "Spine of God". As if that weren't sufficient enough, flashes of THIN LIZZY twin leads on are also heard on "All Eyes Upon You". You should now understand that in an overarching sense the tribal and the spiritual ones clash with outlaw bikers and intravenous drug users on the plane of existence known as "High as the Sun".

It is not exactly a rarity to discuss an album's "growth" qualities, but goddamn, "High as the Sun" comes on stronger and stronger the more you listen and at a certain point becomes impossible to set aside for long without returning to it. I'm still unclear about what exactly these Portland boys stumbled across before the creative process commenced, but it is a good bet that the Oregon Legislature will be criminalizing it in the not too distance future.