One of the coolest quotes that I've come across on High Noon Kahuna's debut album Killing Spree came from Philly deathsludge entity / underground commentator Rot Coven, who described the music on "Spree" as an "utterly baffling blend of 70’s proto-metal, Black Flag / Bl’ast-ish hardcore punk, kaleidoscopic psychedelia, and what sounds like some kind of heavily amplified surf music (which kept making me think of the weird “surfy” parts of Agent Orange for whatever that’s worth to anyone).... like some acid-damaged mid-80’s Arizona band that would have played shows with JFA, Mighty Sphincter, and the Sun City Girls."Man, I could not have put it better myself. That comment was probably the most astute assessment of the band's 2023 disc I've read. The band and that album were (and are) most definitely weird, totally ignoring any semblance of genre guardrails for an explosive riot of melody and heaviness, chaos and musical proficiency, and most importantly, hammering riffage and serious earworm material. High Noon Kahuna traverse those hinterlands between noise rock, hardcore punk, sludgy metallic crunch, surf guitar flourishes and Morricone-esque atmosphere, and wild-eyed, spaced-out psychedelic adventure, where it all bleeds and blurs together into something that is just as unique as their name demands. It's the result of a shared background in the DMV underground that goes back decades; between guitarist Tim Otis (Admiral Browning), drummer Brian Goad (Internal Void / The Larrys / Nagato), and bassist / singer Paul Cogle (Black Blizzard / Vox Populi / Nagato / Slagstorm), each member of the trio has left enduring fingerprints on much of what has been going on in the outer fringes of the DC suburbs for nearly forty years.
That uniqueness takes on a darker cast with their sophomore album This Place Is Haunted, their second release with Crucial Blast. Recorded with Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations, Haunted's mix of burly, noisy rock and mysterious texture work in tandem to evoke the ectoplasmic shadows of the title. Visions of spirit boards and swirling motes of dust above a long-past séance. Ecteneic forces and shaking tables. A door opens. And something looms over High Noon Kahuna's peculiar, punchy songwriting and wigged-out soundscapery. The twelve songs on Haunted wind through a phantasmal labyrinth of odd noise, roaring anthemic hooks, stretched-out stratospheric psych, eerie layered melody, and moments of dark, doom-laden heaviness. Like their first album, it's a long strange trip through a sun-bleached delirium, but this nearly hour-long epic overturns stranger stones and peers into darker corners. Harder, darker, but absolutely brimming with infectious melody, High Noon Kahuna's This Place Is Haunted executes a killer mixture of classic noise rock, heavy shoegaze, psychedelic crunch, and experimental creep. The band is working on a whole new level here. This rumbling riff-beast brilliantly evokes everything from Amphetamine Reptile-era abrasion, soaring Hawkwindian space rock, and the searching instrumentals of Earthless, to the spookier fringes where both krautrock and post-punk blur together, specters of classic doom, and the scintillating guitar sounds of vintage surf and soundtrack music, even dipping into the concussive groove of bands like Kyuss and Queens Of The Stone Age at times. With This Place Is Haunted, High Noon Kahuna have firmly cemented themselves as one of the most unique bands to ever emerge from the DC/MD area, weirder, heavier, and catchier than ever before.
