Spirit Caravan

Dreamwheel (MeteorCity)
by Craig Regala

Strong EP following the powerful Jug Fulla Sun disc on Tollotta. Dreamwheel strikes me as even further from “metal” into the fertile break when blues rock and psychedelia were burping and belching out a stricter, pushier hard rock that owed a bunch to the slower, power shovel garage approach that The Stooges and various other “garage bands” used. Check about 25% of the four-CD Nuggets box for proof (“5 Years Ahead of Their Time” seems so now).

Spirit Caravan work their own territory simply and well. I called it “a fully rounded drone slice of biker/doom that owes less to any specific than the general man vs. nature rock as rock push” six weeks ago, and I’ll call it that again. In their approach, they remind me of a couple other bands out of S. Caravan’s hyphenated genre, but comfortably inside the rock circle, The Wipers and Dead Moon. Those guys also used a basic guitar, drums, bass, and a well-developed voice to set up tunes that follow a pattern and fell within a personal style which leaves enough room to throw in whatever riffs, tempos/chord changes, and bridges that make sense. You can trace Spirit Caravan’s trip by singer/guitar player Wino’s creative urge. It’s followed the same form and has been integral to St. Vitus and the Obsessed as well. Just take ‘m as a kick-ass outlaw rocker garage band who knows the Iommi stomp as well as Jimi’s influence on the World-At-Large (the first four Trower recs, Free, Frijid, Pink, and Motörhead – fuck, I don’t know) with soul intact and the desire to reach beyond the here and now… Not so different than Trouble/Lid, really. Play the arced-psychedelic-feedback-into-power-fry cut-with-a-killer-acid-rock-lead-then-mid-tempo-swaying-groove-rock of “realightment/higher power.” It’s all bundled there. You don’t like that, well, then we don’t have much to talk about.
(PO Box 40322 Albuquerque, NM 87196)