Natas
Cuidad de Brahman (Man’s Ruin)
by Craig Regala & Brian Varney
B: OK, so here’s a band that’s interested in the other side of Kyuss, the one left for dead by bands like Unida. While Unida took all of the “I’m such a man I can kick your ass, fuck your girlfriend, and eat all of your bacon” cocksure swagger, Natas focuses on the noodly nod-out zoner segments. When the holy stone that was the Sky Valley album broke under the sheer heft of its own rock, Unida grabbed “100 Degrees” and Natas took “Space Cadet.” There’s still quite a bit of loud crunch in this band’s lexicon, but it’s much more ambient, more moody. The description on the back cover uses words like “beauty,” “ethereal,” and “trajectory,” if that tells you anything.
C: Yeah, there’s no “love me like a reptile” to this stuff. I dunno if I read it or realized it, but there’s an aura of Pink Floydian haze over this, a pensive kinda pained stroll that’s David Gilmour’s interpretation of blues. Not as much as I hear on the new Caustic Resin, but more the emotional state and tone than the actual form. These songs have parts that get to the delicate strum of downer folk, that mid-period Pink Floyd subsumed into their post psyche-blues/synth/prog. Closer to psychedelic hard rock and a couple cool Japanese bands White Heaven and early Marble Sheep in the way they string together chords, strumminess of a non-suck nature, slow, epic builds, and a purity of editing and arrangements that bespeaks a straight rock approach. No effort to reach for any commercial brass ring. Not that some of these songs aren’t memorable, they’re just as some were on their previous disc, (Delmar, check out the second tune “1980”). It’s a musical trip with no clutter. Not a pop culture one, its intrinsic and extrinsic value are the same.
B: The dude at the local metal store told me this album is “a little too psychedelic.” I guess I’m pretty hard-wired to like that stuff (I don’t want to admit how many times I’ve played Hawkwind’s Space Ritual) so I never even considered that to be an issue. I never really saw how you could like the noodly parts of Sky Valley (“Demon Cleaner” and “Space Cadet,” for example) and not like retard-psych like Hawkwind and the first two UFO albums. But I’ve met a bunch of smart people who don’t, so what the hell do I know? There’s a lot of psych in this Natas stuff, but not the bad psych where they talk about mushrooms and have flutes in the background; it’s more the kind of psych where they find a cool guitar riff and play it over and over for 10 minutes because they’re too wasted to think of anything else. I’d like to hear them take a stab at UFO’s “Star Storm.”
C: Yeah, nothing here is premised on being showy, and there’s no wasted motion. Like any good trip, it keeps moving, albeit at differing velocities, with no extraneous wandering. It may seem a bit like wandering, but trust the band to seemingly circle around, only to slowly elevate on the path, placing you above the starting point – all of a sudden you can see “over the wall.” Yeah, if it’s too psyche (like Core is for many folks), you can always hook the new Fu Manchu or Spirit Caravan. Ditto on the flutes thing. None is the proper amount.
(610 22nd St. #302 San Francisco, CA 94107)
