While Saturday sun baked Carson Creek Ranch from Friday’s mud pit to stone path, the Levitation Tent held in the moisture, retaining a swampy, sticky miasma. This proved perfectly brooding dusk conditions for Israeli threepiece Vaadat Charigim, which swaps its Jerusalem roots for pure Oxford shoegaze.
Theirs is a wall of sound with no discernible structure. How do you say “derivative” in Hebrew? It’s moody languor that’s all rise and no crescendo.
Think Swervedriver without the Mezcal menace.
It’s stuck somewhere between psych-pop sensibilities and scouring soundscape, with a wobbly foot in both. Founder Yuval Haring is a better guitarist than singer, and his overstretched vocal chords suggest the trio should land firmly on the power side and leave nuance behind.
Compare and contrast to the Black Ryder. The last time the Australian studio duo/live quartet played the then-Psych Fest in 2013, torrential rain and thunder cut their set short. “That was a memorable show,” said singer/guitarist Aimee Nash with trademark understatement. No risk of death by lightning this time, but the Black Ryder provide their own electricity.
Not the jolting kind, but the slow judder of rising static.
Drawing initially from the uniform swoon of latest full-length The Door Behind the Door, the live show reveals everything that album lacked – the cool interplay of Nash and fellow Ryder Scott Von Ryper. Whether facing off across dueling droning guitars, or in stripped-down call and response, there’s an easy energy to their interactions, given greater depth and power by the live backline and vocal assists. The crunching viscerality of the material from debut Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride still connects most readily, transcending the studio’s lower key presentation.
No such concerns about This Will Destroy You, the band whose name makes a promise they absolutely deliver. As in crashing, crushing, multilayered post-rock. They’ve rejected the label, but it fits so perfectly.
Chris King’s scorching guitar creates an inferno over which the always-seated Jeremy Galindo’s classical picking glides and soars. Donovan Jones savages his bass like his fingers are ironclad, all lifted and swayed by Alex Bhore’s complicated crashing rhythms. Suddenly the maelstrom can disappear, like passing into the eye of a storm.
Then it comes roaring back like a typhoon, unstoppable and majestic. In a weekend that’s all about cosmic consciousness, the San Marcos quartet evokes the sound of suns forming and nebulae spreading.
Levitation preview and reviews.
This article appears in May 8 • 2015.
