CARLTON MELTON - Where This Leads 2LP

Highly recommended.

"One of the most interesting things about Carlton Melton’s music is that it is split in two. On each album, from debut Country Ways onward, there lives a restless conflict between different approaches: the experimental, the avant-garde and the improvisatory jostles for space with some of the more conventional tropes of heavy rock such as bludgeoning riffs and structured songwriting. Where This Leads, the San Francisco band’s seventh LP, is particularly divided within itself, and it makes for arguably their most compelling and original work yet.

Opener ‘The Stars Are Dying’ is firmly in the realm of abstraction, an exercise in pure atmosphere that might be compared with Sunn O)))’s sonic recreation of the earth’s tectonic shifts on Pyroclasts, with its rhythm-less, swollen soundscape of guitar effects and synths. At over 17 minutes long this exhausting and relentlessly amorphous track dominates the album, along with the other track that flirts with the edges of accessibility, the 13-minute ‘Smoke Drip Revisited’, which unwaveringly repeats its minimalist guitar refrain.

The rest of the album is mixed between rough, uncomplicated and propulsive rock that might have sat neatly on Carlton Melton albums gone by, and, more interestingly, a sonic aesthetic that feels more folk-informed than one might associate with this band. Previous album Mind Minerals was perhaps the apex, and even the conclusion, of their noisiest tendencies (or at least that volume being the dominant force on an album)." - The Quiteus