THE ACID TEST RECORDINGS & LITTLE CLOUD RECORDS 10th July 2020
This begins with that lock-step drum sound that is trademarked to Can but moves into garage distortion and drawling spaced vocals. That beat keeps up and it gets repetitively intense. There are only six tracks but they are long tracks, music belonging to the underground tradition and indebted to Krautrock bands of the sixties as well as British space-rock. Amps are driven to distortion levels and I can hear a garage roof being blown off.
Guitar and synth provide the buzzing cacophony, while Moorcroftian doomy intonation is buried somewhere in the mix. It’s all about stretching and pulsing, speeding and slowing, bending the flow over six minutes or so. I’m guessing there is some layering, as this is a very full sound for a band with three members. Trios though, have a supernatural ability to listen to each other and make tight music.
Nest Egg are from North Carolina, not somewhere in Europe, as I’d have guessed. They have absorbed and processed European influences for nine years and made them into their own furious creation, full of fire and passion. “D.B. Cooper”, the third track, adds a gloriously spooky drum sound and it gets a little Hammer House Of Horror atop motorik rhythms. The next track, though is an insanely paced punkabilly thrash over a couple of minutes, just because they can. The ten-minute long successor, “Helix”, starts discordant but the polished pure rubber band drum beat drags it all into shape so that the rest can circle and twist above it, till the drums start to throw in rolls, the whole thing crests and it finally collapses. The closer, “Gore”, relies heavily on pace and dynamics too and the psych vibe of the whole lasts the full nine minutes, ticking, tocking and crashing.
All in all, this is a great slab of psych and the combination of motorik repetition and garage sounds will please anyone who likes that sort of thing. The fact that the album is on red vinyl is the cherry on the top and tells you where the band are coming from.