Kyuss - Blues for the Red Sun

Kyuss – Blues for the Red Sun

Dali, 1992

Acquired: Half Price Books, Used, 2013

Price: $2

Somewhere in 2012-2013 I became fascinated with metal. It didn’t last, and barely any of it stuck outside of Liturgy, Mastodon, and Kyuss. I never was a stoner, but I find stoner rock and stoner metal deeply satisfying. Blues for the Red Sun just hit the spot on this lazy day off. The wife and child are off attending to a bridal shower and I’m home alone cleaning up the little loft-area of my in-laws’ house that I have marked as my territory while we are here. The chugging riffs are of the Black Sabbath variety that speak to my soul, and while the music is a little too attached to vintage heavy metal and the shadow of Metallica, there are some really nice psychedelic touches and doomy riffs that really make this something new and something a little off-center. It’s impossible to listen to this without the context of guitarist Josh Homme’s and bassist Nick Oliveri’s later band Queens of the Stone Age. That is also inherently chained to this mythical notion of desert metal. Of dudes loading up on drugs, driving out to the desert, hooking up a generator and offering up tasty riffs to the various cacti and fauna for nothing. Blues for the Red Sun is a bit amateurish (Jeff Garcia’s vocals are abrasive in that cheesy hard rock style that basically IS the 1990s), but there are moments of greatness in the jamming. I hate jamming, but somehow in the context of stoner rock it strikes a nerve. I can groove out a little. Turn my brain off a bit and just live in the dude world for a minute.

"Green Machine"