Best of Year 2019
This is what I needed. With a line up now extended from their original two-piece set up, 75 Dollar Bill's latest (and sixth in total, I think) is a real thick soup affair. A Heinz Big Soup on a sizzling hot day of a record. The 17+ min long title track, which comprises the whole of side A, is a Tony Conrad-like blues deconstruction and reassemblage that takes you right to the heart of the psychic Delta. You can almost feel the mosquitoes biting at the synapses. I remember seeing Sleep perform Dopesmoker ten years back and a friend observing (in possibly an altered state) that the music was so thick you could 'climb it like a ladder'. Where that ladder leads I forgot to ask, but you'd probably find I Was Real somewhere along the way. Heady, heavy, spiritual dissonance. On the flip they rip it up, start again, and rage, but they always come home to the blues, in some altered state. Doesn't everyone?
