International Hello / S/t

Holy Mountain

International Hello is the perfection of California psychedelic rock in all its ecstatic glory. Grady Runyan's guitar playing is as fantastic, spacey and heavy as ever, as is Scott Derr's always-pertinent bass throb. Drummer and singer Rubin Fiberglass is just perfect as a screaming maniac who can actually keep time while Doug Pearson's electronics consistently enhance the dominant power-trio rock that swirls in the sky like some kind of creation myth. In case you don't recognize the names, these guys were the prime movers and shakers behind the band Monoshock. Does it sound like them? Yeah but it's way back there, and this is about a new place they're going. And it's good. You'll see.

"[Monoshock were] three of the most clued-in musical minds I've ever met or observed, and they breathed in and coughed out a whole host of killer influences. Starting with the most obvious: Hawkwind, The Stooges, Can, Black Flag, Pere Ubu, Pink Fairies, Von Lmo, the MC5 and Chrome. Later in their flickeringly brief career they trended more toward heavy Japanese-style PSF psychedelia and outre space rock experimentation a la F/i, Vertical Slit and any number of barefoot Germans from the 1970s. I'm not sure where they'd have ended up had the band not petered out in 1995--it appears from the direction they were trending on... that it was into a heads-down, dark and deep spastic noise murk rather than back to the bull-rushing primitive fuzz-punk squeal of these earlier recordings."
--Jan Hinman, Agony Shorthand

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