Flush It Friday: Keep Moving
Don’t look back.
If you like riffs and also make the questionable decision to read about riff-news on the Internet, you know that Savannah’s Kylesa will be returning in 2025 to play Roadburn. Surely, the band will do other things, and we can absolutely hope for new music. Should we expect it? Maybe! Moreover, should we expect this hypothetical new music to be good? That’s also a maybe! Make no mistake, Kylesa fucking rules, one of the absolute shining gems of both the Georgia music scene and the broader sludge scene. I love that their hometown is an hour north of where I grew up. Practically locals!
So I spent the week with their discography, revisiting old favourites to see what holds up, what might move around in my rankings, what falls a little short. And I thought today would be a grand time to post a few gems from the band throughout the years. Toilet ov Hell only, really, got one year of active Kylesa, and you’ll see a lot of talk about 2015’s Exhausting Fire if you search through the Toilet’s annals. (You’ll also find quite a few Riff ov the Week posts featuring tasty early Kylesa selections.) But Exhausting Fire kinda sucks, as does 2013’s Ultraviolet, so let’s just move on immediately to the good stuff. Sorry, those two albums and those fans! (I’m also going to omit 2012’s compilation From the Vaults, though it is entirely righteous and stuffed to the rafters with great older tracks.)
As we all know, Kylesa was more or less formed out of the ashes of Savannah legends Damad. After a busy 2000, with both an LP and split with Baltimore maniacs Meatjack, Damad called it quits, and Philip Cope and Brian Duke set out to start Kylesa. By the way, if you’ve never listened to Meatjack, go take a serious listen. If you dig Today is the Day in any way, Meatjack will be for you. The split with Damad is a great start, but you can’t beat the self-titled LP. Just really ugly turn-of-the-century sludgy noise. Anyways, after the unfortunate passing of Brian Duke in 2001, Kylesa released their self-titled debut, featuring Pushead artwork a la the final Damad LP Burning Cold. Kylesa always struck me as less out there as Damad, more refined even if it wasn’t all that refined at the beginning. Without disparaging Damad in any fashion, Kylesa is, I think, an immediate and obvious progression from Burning Cold. And there’s simply no way to say that this doesn’t have to do with the addition of Laura Pleasants, whose presence in Kylesa seems, by now, to be almost defining. (The same could be said of Victoria Scalisi, who passed in 2017, and her role as unhinged vocalist in Damad. Seriously, her shrieks are wild.) Kylesa the album is heavy, a little rough, employing their patented multi-vocalist attack, and it is still great. I mean, this is one of the first songs they ever wrote/released!
After a slew of splits, including one with the incredibly named (and incredibly good) Cream Abdul Babar from Tallahassee, FL, Kylesa released To Walk a Middle Course in 2005. Middle Course was, until 2010, my favourite Kylesa record. It is immensely evolved from the debut, and has a larger, more expansive, thoughtful sound. The band is writing better songs, dabbling in different adjacent genres, and showcasing the unique flavour of Savannah sludge. While the band will obviously draw comparisons to Baroness (who released Second in 05) and Mastodon, you could hear, certainly on Middle Course, how big of an influence Rwake was for them. There’s a creepy psychedelia (or a psychedelic creepiness) to Kylesa that really starts to manifest itself on their sophomore record, a sound that compliments the more hooky passages that will, much later, become a big part of their sound. To that point, I still remember when I heard the refrain “Have you ever known fear? Have you ever felt fault? Have you ever felt something? Did you ever seem lost?” from album opener “In Memory.” Returning to it this week, it’s as powerful as it was almost 20 years ago. Because the answer was and still is yes, to every question: yes! A resounding yes!
Kylesa immediately followed To Walk a Middle Course with 2006’s Time Will Fuse Its Worth. It’s as aggressive as its predecessor and nearly identical in quality. It feels there was a time when debates raged over which was better, a question that seems to me to be quite difficult to settle. Instead of waxing poetic about Time, I’d like to share a paragraph from a Metal Archives review that is hilariously wrong about the band and what makes them so good: “Well, i’d have to say that overall, it wasn’t worth the wait and no amount of time will fuse this records worth. The thing is, which to me is incredibly frustrating, is the fact that this record wouldn’t necessarily be THAT bad … If it wasn’t for the vocals. According to the bands information on Metal Archives, they have three vocalists. Two are male and one is female. I’m not understanding the point of using three vocalists. ‘Time WIll Fuse Its Worth’ is obviously quite an experimental record, but that doesn’t justify the mess Kylesa make of using three vocalists. One, and I cannot tell which one, sounds like the lead singer from The Offspring, which isn’t good. He/she because it really is unclear who is singing, is terrible at vocals. They, and that means all of them, have no presence. The vocals are just THERE, they don’t do much to compliment the music that is on offer to the audience. They simply exist and that’s putting it kindly.” God bless you, our Siblings in Christ over at Metal Archives. You simply never disappoint. (This person gave this record a 30% by the way. Incredible. Please listen to “What Becomes an End” and tell me the vocals detract from the song. I’ll wait. Or also “Identity Defined.” C’mon.)
Kylesa returned in 2009 with Static Tensions, an album that was always my friend Hank’s favourite and an album that might represent the band at its best. While it’s not my favourite, you can see so clearly how everything works. While you can think of it as a bridge between the band’s first three albums and the three albums that would follow, it is also a fusion of those sounds, keeping in tact as it does the profound sonic and emotional heaviness of the earlier albums but introducing the poppier psych-rock sound that defines the 2010s records. We’re also, if you take a look at the clock, getting to the point in time when Kylesa’s major contemporaries are taking poppier and proggier and more psychedelic turns, to varying results. It all makes sense! Also, and most importantly, it all works. Static Tensions could be your new favourite Kylesa record, if it isn’t already.
And so we arrive at 2010’s Spiral Shadow; the band had left Prosthetic Records for Season of Mist (I know, I know), and had fully fallen into the psychedelic thunder-pop of southeastern sludge. This is the same year Torche released the beloved Songs for Singles EP and was, sadly not going to recover and release another perfect front-to-back album again. This is one year before Mastodon would release the poppy-as-hell-but-still-delightfully-fun The Hunter, before finally falling entirely off a cliff after Once More Round the Sun. Baroness is also on their way to totally blowing it, with even their 2009 effort Blue being, for me, a pretty big miss, though I grant it’s better than anything after. Rwake, though? Rwake is going to release Rest in 2011, the band’s magnum opus and, as I once argued on this website, one of the best metal records of the 2010s (if not the best.) All that to say: 2010 was an interesting time for this collection of bands, related by geography and sound.
Spiral Shadow, to return to the band in question, absolutely blew me away. For all its melody, there is still a behemoth of riffs lurking. The riffs are still swirling and spiraling around you, like they always have, but they’re more grounded, more tender in their encircling of you. The band trails off, letting an uneasy atmosphere rise to the surface. The band swaggers through big, thundering riffs. Pleasants’ vocals are the closest to clean as they’ve ever been. Cope, too, is finding a different register, though the two are still working together beautifully. This all culminates in perhaps the band’s best three-song-run in their career: “Drop Out” into “Crowded Road” into “Don’t Look Back.” Both “Drop Out” and “Crowded Road” are exemplary in blending light and dark, atmosphere and riffs. Just check that “Crowded Road” riff that reaches its apex at 1:12 or so and then, much as the album title suggests, continues to spiral ever upward, with the steady beat of multiple drum sets marching you forward through a dizzying dance through Eastern-tinged solos to the sparkling return of the main riff. But it’s “Don’t Look Back,” the middle-of-the-album anthem that almost passes as radio-friendly that, to this day, has me shaking my head with a giant smile, teary eyes, and a tingling exuberance crawling through me. It’s so spirited, buoyant, positive, uplifting, passionate. It’s so… surprising! I still can’t quite believe it’s there, the band’s own version of Mastodon’s “The Creature Lives,” a kind of straight-forward triumphalism that challenges what you thought a band like that would ever explore. I simply love it.
There’s much left to be said about Spiral Shadow, and it feels a disservice to the album to leave without commenting upon the back half of the album. All I’ll say about the second of Spiral Shadow: even if it’s slightly goofy when Pleasants says, “You’re fucking with my mind…” on “Don’t Forget,” that song is still an explosive celebration of Soundgarden and Melvins proportions. (Am I really not going to mention the title track, which might even be the best song on the album, too, or the incredible closer “Dust”? Sheesh!)
But, cheese and rice! We’ve got to Flush this week. Why do y’all let me go on like this?
Stick put Cold Cave very low on The Monday Press, and I’m taking that personally. Roldy picked a hot one with the new Demiser on This Toilet Tuesday.
Toilet Radio 512 with Joe, Jordan, and somebody who spent their time in a motel for a local music fest? Yikes!
Brock is back, baby! And, as always, he’s got the goods. Motherfuckin’ TEETH is a week away.
Reliquary Tower would have you believe the new Melt-Banana is nigh perfect, with a 4.5/5 toilets. And who am I to argue? He’s such a sweetie!
Joe dropped a super fun premiere from Toilet friends VHS, as the band looks to bring Morricone to Morrisound. Fun, dusty stuff!
That’s some good action in the Bowl this week. What were favourite songs/albums/bands you heard thanks to the work of our contributors? Go let ’em know! And then drop those GBUs in the comments on this here post. You know I love you all very much, and I will kiss each and every one of you on the forehead and say, “Good job. You’re killin’ it!” XOXO
