Riding Easy   Page 2

Holden, Randy

Population II

Riding Easy

“Godzilla just walked into the room. People just stood there with their eyes and mouths wide open.” To hear Randy Holden describe the audience’s reaction in 1969 to his solo debut performing with a teeth-rattling phalanx of 16 (sixteen!) 200 watt Sunn amps is about as close as one will get to truly experience the moment heavy metal music morphed into existence. However, at last Riding Easy have unearthed the proper fossil record. Population II, the now legendary, extremely rare album by guitarist / vocalist Holden and drummer / keyboardist Chris Lockheed is considered to be one of the earliest examples of doom metal. Though its original release was a very limited in number and distribution, like all great records, its impact over time has continued to grow. In 1969, Holden, fresh off his tenure with proto-metal pioneers Blue Cheer (appearing on one side of the New! Improved! Blue Cheer album and touring for the better part of a year in the group), aimed for more control over his band. Thus, Randy Holden - Population II was born, the duo naming itself after the astronomical term for a particular star cluster with heavy metals present. “I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before,” Holden explains. “I was interested in discordant sounds that could be melodic but gigantically huge. I rented an Opera house for rehearsal, set up with 16 Sunn amps. That’s what I was going for, way over the top.” And over the top it is. The...

V/a

Brown Acid - The Tenth Trip

Riding Easy

Here it is, the tenth edition of Brown Acid in just half as many years! As always, Riding Easy has packed in the highest highs of the dankest hard rock, heavy psych, and proto-metal tracks previously lost to the sands of time. Like throughout this series, all of these tracks were painstakingly licensed legitimately and the artists were paid. It’s hard to believe its up to ten volumes of this lysergic Neanderthal wail, but the long-lost jams just keep-a-coming like Texas crude to fuel the rock ’n’ roll engine and melt one’s metal mind.  “Will do for hard rock, proto-metal and heavy psych what Nuggets did for garage rock, and bring it to a wider audience of collectors and music fans.” —The Guardian  “Mining the surprising rich reserves of heavy rock and proto-metal from the ’60s and ’70s, these collections have been crucial to understanding the history of a subgenre of rock that had far deeper roots than most fans realize.” —Paste Magazine

Ice

Ice Age

Riding Easy

As Riding Easy Records’ highly successful Brown Acid series (now at ten volumes and counting) proves, there is a massive amount of incredible heavy psych and proto-metal music that has been lost to the sands of time. Case in point, the astoundingly great 50 year-old album The Ice Age by Indianapolis quintet ICE was never even released upon its completion. In 1970, the band recorded ten original songs at 8-Track Studios in Chicago, only to break up shortly thereafter. Two of the tracks were eventually released as a 45 in 1972, but confusingly under a different band name, Zukus! The A-side of that single was featured on Brown Acid – The Ninth Trip, which led Riding Easy Records to discover when licensing the track that an entire album had been languishing in obscurity all of this time. The 2-inch master tapes had been shelved and forgotten until recently when The Ice Age tracks were converted to digital and remixed, preserving the sounds of the original vocals and instruments. Finally, half a century later, this ten-song album of radio-ready rock will finally see light of day.   The Ice Age is an exceptional archive of hard edged rock with serious pop hooks akin to something like Grand Funk Railroad meets The Guess Who and The Move. It rocks hard, but is also interlaced with glorious melodic hooks. Had fate been less fickle, this album would’ve long been a classic rock radio staple. This album is truly an incredible and unprecedented...

Goners, The

Good Mourning

Riding Easy

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Swedish quintet The Goners announce their forthcoming debut album Good Mourning on Riding Easy Records! The Goners feature former Salem’s Pot vocalist / guitarist Nate Gone and former members of Swedish rock band Yvonne. Don’t make a big deal about it. This is something new: “Rock bottom. A place you have to throw yourself over the edge and burn all your bridges to reach. A place where the devil is laughing as a constant reminder of everything that went to shit. A place where you owe. “As the echoes of the past get louder and the forget-me-now’s no longer work, you have to pick up the remaining pieces and try to make them fit. You can only wake up in an unknown bed with aching intestines and a throbbing noise inside your skull, still craving more, so many times until you realize that your life didn’t quite turn out to be what you expected it to be. The killing floor is crowded and when the smoke starts to clear you start to notice just how bad you’ve been letting yourself go. It’s Monday. You are on your own now. “And even as you start to do the right, start paying your dues and bills, doing the 9 to 5 and saying your sorries, you’re still standing there like a sack of dead meat in a stinkin’ world of decay where nobody cares. Gone but still aware. Ain’t that something? Ain’t that grand! “There’s no remedy,...

Holy Serpent

Endless

Riding Easy

The forthcoming third album by Melbourne, Australia’s Holy Serpent could likely be its defining moment. Seemingly bottomless in its relentless heft, with billowing and suffocating riffs leading glistening melodies, it’s the sound of a band that has locked on to something unique. Endless is fully conceptualized throughout, encapsulating an oceanic theme from the lyrics and art, even to the very structure of the sounds themselves. The six-song, forty-minute album finds vocalist / guitarist Scott Penberthy, guitarist Nick Donoughue, bassist Dave Bartlett and drummer Lance Leembruggen expanding their melodic hooks while simultaneously taking listeners on a rigorous journey. It was written over the course of two months, then recorded in seclusion at Beveridge Road Recording Studios near Australia’s beautiful Dandenong Ranges with head engineer Marc Russo and mixed by Mike Deslandes. Surrounding themselves with nature and no distractions allowed the band to focus on every detail of the album as a coherent whole. In the time since their self-titled Riding Easy debut in mid-2015, Melbourne, Australia’s Holy Serpent have gained a lot of attention for their rather punk version of heavy psych and metal. Their 2016 skate-metal leaning album Temples further defined their more experimental blend of early Soundgarden, Saint Vitus and Kyuss that eschews simplistic ’70s-worship in favor of shimmering sonics and uncommon production techniques. Nonetheless, Endless is like all of the band’s earliest visions fully realized and honed into an album beyond easy classification.

V/a

Brown Acid - The Ninth Trip

Riding Easy

The forthcoming ninth edition of the popular compilation series featuring long-lost vintage ’60s-’70s proto-metal and stoner rock singles, Brown Acid - The Ninth Trip is set for release! Some of the best thrills of the Internet music revolution are the ability to find extremely rare music with great ease. But even with such vast archives to draw from, quite a lot of great songs have gone undiscovered for nearly half a century—particularly in genres that lacked hifalutin arty pretense. Previously, only the most extremely dedicated and passionate record collectors had the stamina and prowess to hunt down long forgotten wonders in dusty record bins—often hoarding them in private collections, or selling at ridiculous collector’s prices. Legendary compilations like Nuggets, Pebbles, ad nauseum, have exhausted the mines of early garage rock and proto-punk, keeping alive a large cross-section of underground ephemera. However, few have delved into and expertly archived the wealth of proto-metal, pre-stoner rock tracks collected on Brown Acid.  “Will do for hard rock, proto-metal and heavy psych what Nuggets did for garage rock, and bring it to a wider audience of collectors and music fans.” —The Guardian  “So rare that diehard fuzz junkies say you’d have a better chance of winning the lottery than finding a physical 45 RPM single by one of the bands featured on their latest installment.” —Dangerous Minds

BlackWater HolyLight

Veils Of Winter

Riding Easy

Blackwater Holylight, as the name suggests, is all about contrasts. It’s a fluid convergence of sound that’s heavy, psychedelic, melodic, terrifying and beautiful all at once.  As a heavy band, their songs aren’t anchored to riffs, but rather riffs come and go in waves that surface throughout the band’s meditative, entrancing songs. It’s a hypnotic sound, with orchestral structures that often build tension and intrigue before turning the song on its head—not by simply getting louder or heavier, nor by just layering elements. They expertly subvert the implied heaviness of a part, dissecting it and splaying the song’s guts out to seep across the sonic spectrum. Now, having toured together extensively following the band’s wildly-successful breakout self-titled debut in 2018, Blackwater Holylight has honed their sound and identity to a powerfully captivating beast. Their live set is all about the slow build, seeming to combine the melodic tension of early Sonic Youth crossed with the laconic fever-dream blues of the first Black Sabbath album, and wiry experimentation of post-punk and krautrock. The lineup on this album is Allison (Sunny) Faris (bass / vocals), Laura Hopkins (guitar / vocals) and Sarah McKenna (synths), with new guitarist Mikayla Mayhew and drummer Eliese Dorsay fleshing out their sound in exciting ways. “The process of this album was vastly different from our first record,” says Faris. “One, because we recorded it over the course of a few weeks, whereas the first record was over the course of about a year. And two, this...

Firebreather

Under A Blood Moon

Riding Easy

Fire is what happens when a carbon based object is consumed by oxygen. That chemical reaction is fitting to the sound of Firebreather: the riffs are suffocating, the rhythms fast-moving and all-consuming. It’s so blindingly and deafeningly monolithic, don’t be surprised to be gasping for air while listening. The Gothenburg, Sweden trio has a streamlined focus on driving, symphonic riffs in the vein of High On Fire, Inter Arma and their tour and label-mates Monolord. The guitar and bass tones are, quite simply, entrancing. Like watching flames engulf a forest, the billowing guitar tones are simultaneously beautiful and destructive, while the rhythms sway and lunge with vicious precision. “It’s riff-based, heavy as fuck, but with a groove to it,” explains vocalist / guitarist Mattias Nööjd, formerly of popular Swedish doom merchants Galvano. “We had gotten off a tour with Monolord in February of 2018 and by that time we had the song ‘Firebreather’ done,” but soon thereafter new drummer Axel Wittbeck joined the fold. “Once Axel had joined, it was like the flood gates opened,” says bassist Kyle Pitcher. “The rest of the album just came together.” Under A Blood Moon was recorded at Elementstudion in Gothenburg with engineer Oskar Karlsson, who also recorded the band’s lauded 2017 self-titled debut on Suicide Records.

Warish

Down In Flames

Riding Easy

Imagine if Incesticide-era Nirvana were crossed with Static Age-era garage-punk Misfits—a sinister low-budget horror rock with a visceral, twisted weirdness and bludgeoning riffs. Some might call it nightmarish, Riding Easy call it Warish.  Warish is a very newly-minted SoCal trio formed in early 2018 that has wasted no time making its presence known. The band formed when guitarist / vocalist and pro-skater Riley Hawk (son of skating legend Tony Hawk) and drummer Bruce McDonnell decided they wanted to try their hand at something more distinct than they’d done previously. “We wanted to do simpler riffs and a fun live show,” Riley explains. “A little more punk, a little bit of grunge... a little evil-ish.” Their sound takes cues from a variety of cool underground sounds and twists it all into an energetic and exciting fist-to-the-face of dark fury. Hawk’s effect-laden vocals hearken to early Butthole Surfers and David Yow’s tortured caterwaul in Scratch Acid. The guitars are heavy and powerful, though decidedly not straightforward cookie cutter punk; more like Cobain’s and Buzz Osbourne’s wiry contortions. The rhythms bash and pummel right through it all with aggressive force ensuring that nothing gets overly complicated and the horrors keep coming throughout the band’s warlike assault.  “Remember when indie rock sounded all grimy, corroded and metal-sludgy—the last thing you’d hear in a commercial or being played at an arena show? Warish do. It’s music to the ears of anyone who wants to damage their ears.” —Rolling Stone   “Warish totally rules... An...

Acid King

Busse Woods

Riding Easy

***BACK IN STOCK ON VINYL!!!  Every small town encompasses that one long stretch of forest where kids run to get high, jam out, and just escape. For San Francisco-based stoner metal trio, Acid King vocalist, guitarist, frontwoman, and mastermind Lori Woods, Busse Woods offered such a retreat in her native Illinois as a teenager in the ’70s. This 3,700-acre section of the Cook County Forest Preserve system beckoned her during high school with its buffet of dope, frisbee challenges, and Black Sabbath blaring from numerous trunks well past sundown. Those days left such an imprint on Lori she titled Acid King’s second full-length released in 1999 Busse Woods. Celebrating its 20th year with a special reissue on Riding Easy Records and tour in 2019, it represents the heart and soul of the band. The album still exudes the same sense of mysticism it did upon release in 1999. As the story goes, Lori and bandmates Joey Osbourne (drums) and Brian Hill (bass) entered a practice space to write the full-length follow-up to their debut Down With The Crown. Organically, they jammed out five originals and a take on “39 Lashes” from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. As everything gelled, they recorded with legendary engineer Billy Anderson. Prominent Bay Area artist Frank Kozik initially released the CD on his Man’s Ruin record label. Then “everything fell apart.” Behind the scenes, personal and professional relationships crumbled. Marriages ended. Lineups shifted. In the face of such tumult, the music of...

Here Lies Man

No Ground To Walk Upon

Riding Easy

Here Lies Man took the music world by storm in 2017 with their self-titled debut positing the intriguing hypothesis: What if Black Sabbath played Afrobeat? Since that time, they have expanded and expounded upon their sound and ideas of heavy riff rock and psych within the ancient rhythmic formula of the clave. The L.A. based band comprised of Antibalas members have toured relentlessly over the past two years, while also releasing a second album, You Will Know Nothing and an EP, Animal Noises, both in 2018. No Ground to Walk Upon is their third album. It continues with an ongoing concept of playing a soundtrack to an imaginary movie, with each song being a scene.  Rough Trade named Here Lies Man in their prestigious Top 10 Albums of 2017. BBC 6 and Classic Rock Magazine deemed it among the year’s best, as well as countless other press outlets singing its praises. 2018’s You Will Know Nothing furthered the band’s reputation for genre-smashing rhythmic experimentation, topping many year-end lists as well as earning features from countless metal and indie rock outlets, plus cover stories in weekly papers. This latest album is the next step in the band’s rapid ascent to what is bound to be influential upon riff-based rock. “We’re very conscious of how the rhythms service the riffs,” explains founder and vocalist / guitarist / multi-instrumentalist Marcos Garcia (who also plays guitar in Antibalas) of the band’s sound. “Tony Iommi’s (Black Sabbath) innovation was to make the riff the...

Warish

Running Scared / Their Demise

Riding Easy

Imagine if Incesticide-era Nirvana were crossed with Static Age-era garage-punk Misfits—a sinister low-budget horror rock with visceral, twisted weirdness and bludgeoning riffs. Some might call it nightmarish, Riding Easy calls it Warish. Warish is a very newly minted SoCal trio formed in early 2018 that has wasted no time making its presence known. The band formed when guitarist / vocalist and pro-skater Riley Hawk (son of skating legend Tony Hawk) and drummer Bruce McDonnell decided they wanted to try their hand at something more distinct than they’d done previously. Here is their second EP Running Scared / Their Demise. Their sound takes cues from a variety of cool underground sounds and twists it all into an energetic and exciting fist to the face of dark fury. Hawk’s effect-laden vocals hearken to early Butthole Surfers and David Yow’s tortured caterwaul in Scratch Acid. The guitars are heavy and powerful, though decidedly not straightforward cookie-cutter punk; more like Cobain’s and Buzz Osbourne’s wiry contortions. The rhythms bash and pummel right through it all with aggressive force ensuring that nothing gets overly complicated and the horrors keep coming throughout the band’s warlike assault.  “Remember when indie rock sounded all grimy, corroded and metal-sludgy—the last thing you’d hear in a commercial or being played at an arena show? Warish do. It’s music to the ears of anyone who wants to damage their ears.” —Rolling Stone “Warish totally rules... An awesome mixture of punk energy, biker rock fuzz, and grunge growl.” —Kerrang!

Zig Zags

They’ll Never Take Us Alive

Riding Easy

“Eight years, seven singles, three albums, three bass players, two drummers and God knows how many shows later —Zig Zags has continually evolved, mutated, transitioned and transformed, rising again and again, like a phoenix emerging from the flame.  “The addition of the newest member of our triumvirate—multi-instrumentalist, designated bassist (and longtime Zig Zags sound engineer) Sean Hoffman—recalls those golden moments past, when destiny stepped in, like when Neil Peart joined Rush or Bob Rock teamed up with Metallica. In short - the circle is now complete, the cornerstone has been set and the winged serpent rises—once again.  “Some say it’s luck, but really, it’s about patience. A band is like a relationship. You have to know when to push, and when to hold back. You gotta listen and you gotta learn. We look to the masters. Like Henry and Glenn, we’ve gone from drinking hooch to pumpin’ iron. We quit smoking. Two of us are married, for chrissakes! After 2017’s brutal European tour, which left us coughing blood and taking names, we sought out Lemmy’s Doctor (Feel Good), who diagnosed us with”Rock’n’roll Pneumonia”. Like Lemmy, we were pushing too hard. And if you push too hard you’ll end up in an apartment above The Rainbow Room, playing video poker on Christmas Eve (which is also your birthday)...but that’s another story.  “This album, our first with Riding Easy, was written over the last year. It’s reveals our longtime roots, our enduring love (all hail!) to the early punk of our hero(ines)...

The Well

Death And Consolation

Riding Easy

Death And Consolation is without a doubt a weighty album title. And, Austin, TX trio The Well is among the heaviest heavy psych bands in existence. So when Riding Easy says that there’s even more darkness and intensity to the band’s third album than previous efforts, take heed. It’s a deep sea diving bell of enveloping heaviness and longing. While The Well continue to walk an intriguing line between authentic early ’70s doom / heavy psych and frayed weirdness of dark folk—especially with their haunting unison male / female vocals—this new album also adds the stark vibe of post-punk acts like Joy Division and early The Cure.There’s also much less jamming, the songs are tight and concise. And, was it mentioned, heavy? The band tuned down a full step to C-standard tuning for this album, which gives the proceedings its monstrous sound. Sonically,the album picks up where the band—guitarist / vocalist Ian Graham, bassist / vocalist Lisa Alley, and drummer Jason Sullivan—left off with their widely heralded 2016 Pagan Science. The band once again recorded with longtime producer / engineer Chico Jones at Estuary Studio in 2018, who has turned the knobs for all three of their albums—Jones engineered the band’s debut album Samsara with producer Mark Deutrom (Melvins, Sunn O)))) in 2013. Samsara, released late September 2014, was ranked the #1 debut album of 2014 by The Obelisk and Pagan Science among the Best of 2016 from the Doom Charts collective. Likewise, the band’s intense—some even say “possessed”—live performances...

V/a

Brown Acid - The Eighth Trip

Riding Easy

The hard stuff saga continues with Brown Acid - The Eighth Trip! Yet again, Riding Easy has searched high and low to bring ten tracks of straight blue flame fire from the golden age of heaviness. As usual, these rare tracks have been carefully curated, analogically sourced, and fully licensed so one can listen guilt-free and save a lot of time and money tracking down the original copies. This Trip comes straight at ya with an all out attack, quite literally—Attack’s “School Daze” kicks out the jams Detroit-style. White Rock will knock your stank-ass socks off with their 1972 burner “Please Don’t Run Away”. This 45 was privately released by this Houston-based band that reportedly played shows with Josefus, Stone Axe, and Purple Sun. Riverside’s two-sider from 1974 rips from front to back. It’s also exclusively available here and is virtually unknown. And that’s just some of the stellar collection of rare singles featured here. Some of the best thrills of the Internet music revolution is the ability to find extremely rare music with great ease. But even with such vast archives to draw from, quite a lot of great songs have gone undiscovered for nearly half a century—particularly in certain genres. Previously, only the most extremely dedicated and passionate record collectors had the stamina and prowess to hunt down long forgotten wonders in dusty record bins—often hoarding them in private collections, or selling at ridiculous collector’s prices. Legendary compilations like Nuggets, Pebbles, ad nauseum, have exhausted the mines of early garage...

Monolord

Fairies Wear Boots

Riding Easy

REVOLVER EXCLUSIVE COLOR - Monolord's 12-minute cover of Black Sabbath classic "Fairies Wear Boots" pressed on gray w/ black smoke colored vinyl with etching on the b-side.  Monolord's enveloping, syrupy sludge is a vibe, it's a state of mind. Not riffs for riffs sake, but a collective buzzing, rattling and rumbling that's more total environment than collection of songs. Together, guitarist/vocalist Thomas Jäger, drummer Esben Willems and bassist Mika Häkki create a massive, dynamic sound with ultra-low frequencies serving as its fourth member.   Monolord is a rare breed: A band both encompassing and transcending genre; a vortex of heavy rock density that consumes all others. Rust, the band's third full length, truly exemplifies why it received universal praise in reviews and landed atop multiple Album of The Year lists for 2017 -- including the #1 Album of 2017 on the Doom Charts collective of journalists, bloggers, radio and podcasters.

Hell Fire

Mania

Riding Easy

The free-wheelin’ creativity and infectious vitality of the ’80s Bay Area thrash scene is a moment forever locked in time, but its spirit lives on in the galloping guitar picks, soaring harmonies and blistering rhythms of San Francisco quartet Hell Fire. The band’s perfect hybrid of NWOBHM theatrics and American thrash attitude delivers a rousing and genuine expansion on sounds long lost to pointless battles over who can be the most “extreme.” Mania, the band’s third album and proper debut on Riding Easy Records warmly condenses elements of influences like Angel Witch, Iron Maiden, Rainbow, Exodus, Metallica, Riot, Virtue and Diamond Head into ten tracks of headbanging MUYA anthems. “Thematically, everything on the album comes from personal experiences,” says vocalist / guitarist Jake Nunn. “From the highs of partying together out here in Oakland, or the nostalgia of being a kid learning Zeppelin on a beat up guitar, to the extreme lows of isolation, personal trauma, and mental illness. Sonically we want our records to sound like you’re standing in front of the stage at a show. The power of Marshall stacks in front of your face, drums at your ear level, thunder of the bass and feeling the presence of the room.” Hell Fire achieves just that—and then some—on Mania.

BUS

Never Decide

Riding Easy

From the opening notes of Never Decide, the Riding Easy Records debut album by Athens, Greece quartet Bus The Unknown Secretary (aka B.U.S.), one knows it’s going to be a wild funhouse ride. It doesn’t sound like just four people, it sounds like a mob of wild-eyed lunatics on the expressway to your skull. And don’t worry about not knowing what the band’s name means.  Heavy bands typically don’t know how to make music fun. This isn’t goofy, novelty rock—this is clever, spirited and anthemic rock that doesn’t get bogged down in trying to sound menacing. Never Decide is a multifaceted album in the vein of classic hitters like The Hellacopters, Alice Cooper Band, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Orange Goblin.  The band formed in Athens in 2011, releasing two EPs and full length The Impious Tapes, followed by The Cross EP (2014), and The Unknown Secretary LP in 2016. During that time the band has toured extensively throughout Greece and in neighboring nations. The release of this latest album will see them expanding that touring radius considerably.  Never Decide was recorded in just five days in February 2018 with multi-talented engineer and band’s beloved friend John Vulgaris at Electric Highway Studios in Athens, Greece. The entire band—drummer Aris Fasoulis, bassist Spiros Papadatos, and guitarists Fotis Kolokithas and Politis—recorded the instrumental tracks live in three days, reserving the last two for vocals. Over the two months that followed Vulgaris and the band fine-tuned the mix into a subtle and clever...

Warish

Warish

Riding Easy

Imagine if Incesticide-era Nirvana were crossed with Static Age-era Misfits—sinister low budget horror-rock with a visceral, twisted weirdness and bludgeoning riffs. Some might call it nightmarish, we call it Warish.  Warish is a very newly-minted SoCal trio formed in early 2018 that has wasted no time making its presence known. The band formed when guitarist / vocalist Riley Hawk and drummer Bruce McDonnell decided they wanted to try their hand at something more distinct than they’d done previously. “We wanted to do simpler riffs and a fun live show,” Riley explains. “A little more punk, a little bit of grunge… a little evil-ish.” Their sound takes cues from a variety of cool underground sounds and twists it all into an energetic and exciting fist to the face of dark fury. Hawk’s effect-laden vocals hearken to early Butthole Surfers and David Yow’s tortured caterwaul in Scratch Acid. The guitars are heavy and powerful, though decidedly not straightforward cookie-cutter punk; more like Cobain’s and Buzz Osbourne’s wiry contortions. The rhythms bash and pummel right through it all with aggressive force ensuring that nothing gets overly complicated and the horrors keep coming throughout this five track, eleven minute debut.

Hell Fire

Free Again

Riding Easy

Formed in recent years in San Francisco (though it may seem more likely that they hatched fresh out of a time travel portal from the mid-’80s Bay Area thrash scene), Hell Fire have the classic look and sound of modern metal’s halcyon days. Their sonic assault warmly condenses elements of Angel Witch, Iron Maiden, Rainbow, Exodus, Metallica, Riot, Virtue and Diamond Head into eight tracks of headbanging MUYA anthems.  The free-wheelin’ creativity and infectious vitality of Bay Area thrash is a moment forever locked in time, but its spirit lives on in this band’s galloping guitar picks, soaring harmonies and blistering rhythms. The band’s perfect hybrid of NWOBHM theatrics and American thrash attitude delivers a rousing and genuine expansion on sounds long lost to pointless battles over who can be the most “extreme.” Hell Fire began when bass player Herman Bandala moved to San Francisco from Tijuana, Mexico, with the hopes of forming a heavy metal band. Herman posted an ad to Craigslist which caught the attention of guitarist Tony Campos. They bonded over a mutual love of ’80s thrash and NWOBHM. Just before they entered the studio to record their debut album Metal Masses, Jake Nunn joined on vocals. The lineup continued to develop over time, finally solidifying with Nunn also taking up second guitar duties and drummer Mike Smith joining prior to recording Free Again.  This sophomore album is being released for the first time on vinyl and remastered for CD and download. It was recorded over five...

Bewitcher

s/t

Riding Easy

Bewitcher is a Satanic speed metal band from Portland, Oregon. Here is their manifesto: “Rock ’n’ roll is the devil’s music, and heavy metal is it’s bastard child. In the 1980s, the radical fundamentalist Christian right-wing in America waged a war against this music, bringing it’s practitioners and it’s unholy muse to the forefront of the public consciousness. Over a quarter-century later, the devil’s rock ’n’ roll is still alive and well, but the war is far from over. And so it came to pass...  “In the year of Thirteen of Satan’s third millennium, a new force rises to defend the ways of old. Bewitcher is the ancient black flame of magic, mayhem, freedom and liberation, burning in blatant opposition to the laughable norms of this modern age. Instead they look to that bygone era, before it’s pollution by imitators of a lesser intention, when heavy metal in all it’s glory truly represented the tenets it was founded upon.  “May your children be corrupted, may your foundations be shaken, may your mundane existences be forever altered, for this spell cannot be broken. Fall and obey! And beware the curse of the Bewitcher!”  “Throw a dart at the track list and come up with a winner no matter where the needle lands. As perfect a summoning of hellish rock ’n’ roll traditions as you’re likely to come across in 2016.”  —No Clean Singing “If you’ve ever wondered what Black Metal would have sounded like with a decent...

V/a

Brown Acid - The Seventh Trip

Riding Easy

Everybody’s favorite source for the hard stuff is back in business, with ten more lethal doses of rare hard rock, heavy psych and proto-metal! Hard to believe it’s seven Trips in and they haven’t lost any steam. As usual, these obscure tracks have all been licensed, the bands have been paid, and the sources are all analog. The quality of tracks seems to increase along with the number of Trips and this cohesive collection comes outta the gate with both guns blazing!  Pegasus recorded one single in Baltimore in 1972 and they made it count. “The Sorcerer” is a throbbing ripper that prior to this was basically unknown. The track title for the Nobody’s Children single and start thinking, oh no, Riding Easy given up on bad trips. Fret not, “Good Times” was originally written as a joke. The song has since been bootlegged numerous times and even covered by the Butthole Surfers, but this is the first time it’s been fully licensed. This latest volume continues with many more boneheaded bangers, crunchy jams, and incredibly damaged heavy slabs. The closer on the Seventh Trip is one the label holds very near and dear. Not only is this record the one that’s taken the longest to secure the rights to, it’s also one of the very best examples of heavy psych ever heard. “The Darkness” was recorded in a basement studio in Kansas City in 1969 when the lead guitarist was only 16. The band was from a rural Missouri...

Alastor

Slave To The Grave

Riding Easy

Alastor hearken to the days when heavy rock was the music of the rebel, the occult adherent and lurker in the shadows, not hipster bros. Theirs is the doom sound for those who discovered it on the edge of town, in the cold rain, perhaps, as an escape from the squares who’ll never understand. Drenched in heavy, distorted darkness and steeped in occult horror that will make your skin crawl and ears cry sweet tears of blood, Slave To The Grave pulls no punches in the Swedish band’s unabashedly bleak themes. The band formed under a bad moon in 2016, consisting of Dharma Gheddon (vocals, bass, acoustic guitar and organ), Lucy Ferian on lead & acoustic guitar and organ, Terry Fying on guitar and Levi Athan on drums. The quartet released its epic three-song debut album Black Magic in early 2017 via Twin Earth Records, followed by the two-track Blood On Satan’s Claw EP on Halloween the same year. Joining forces with Riding Easy Records in 2018, they hunkered down to summon this seven-track hateful gospel with engineer Magnus Sörensen. “It’s an album that circles around the concept of death,” explains lead guitarist Lucy Ferian. “It’s about death in both its spiritual and personal meaning—how death is a part of our everyday life. How it affects our thoughts and actions. How some of us spend our entire life in fear of death, while some seek it. But no matter how you live your life and no matter what you achieve...

Electric Citizen

Helltown

Riding Easy

Helltown, the forthcoming third album by Electric Citizen is, in many ways, a homecoming. While the title may seem fittingly metal (if not exceedingly so), it actually has real relevanc: Helltown, while also multidimensional, is named after the Cincinnati, OH, neighborhood in which the band lives, practices, and where the album was written, recorded and mixed. Now known more prosaically as Northside, Helltown earned its name in the 1800s due to its reputation for rowdy taverns frequented by the neighborhood of factory workers and immigrants. Inasmuch as this album is an ode to the band’s home and its buried past, it also represents a return to the grittier sound of their 2014 debut, Sateen. Furthermore, it marks the return of original bassist Nick Vogelpohl, who rejoins vocalist Laura Dolan, guitarist Ross Dolan and drummer Nate Wagner. It’s a fun, tough, dirty rock ‘n’ roll album. The band’s 2016 album Higher Time was an expansive and somewhat cleaner effort mixed by Black Keys engineer Collin Dupuis. It was a landmark moment for the band earning considerable press praise—Consequence Of Sound named it in the 20 Most Anticipated Albums of 2016 with “the most breakout potential of all the young bands on this list.” And, the band’s endless touring since the first album earned them stints opening for acts like Pentagram, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Fu Manchu, Budos Band, and Wolfmother. What sets Electric Citizen apart from contemporary heavy counterparts is their songwriting. The band writes concise, three-minute, heavy rock...

Dunbarrow

Dunbarrow II

Riding Easy

There’s a hauntingly classic feel to Dunbarrow’s sound that gives it, in the band’s own words, “an eerie rawness.” It’s not raw in a lo-fi or distorted sense—far from it, the production is exceptionally clean and powerful. It’s the vibe to the music that has a dreamlike and ghostly quality, like a mysterious recording imprinted onto an old cassette tape. The band’s pristine, unadorned sound shares the unpretentious brilliance of classic heavy progenitors jamming in basements and barns. Without the Haugesund, Norway quintet’s exceptional musicianship, such an intimate sound would be impossible. Drummer Pål Gunnar Dale sets the skeletal core with driving urgency and tastefully punctuating triplet fills, bassist Sondre Berge Engedal slinks throughout with the limber bounce of John Paul Jones, while Kenneth Lønning’s and Eirik Øvregård’s guitars weave dark, bluesy tapestries with emphasis on melodic chord structures without burying them in distortion or other effects. Vocalist Espen Andersen ties it all together with his warm, folky delivery that gives it all the feel of a bygone era of storytelling in song.  “Maybe more than the previous record, this one is more vocal driven,” Lønning says. “But it still has those quirky transitions, eerie build ups, folk-inspired parts and the haunting solos.” Many of the album’s poetic lyrics were written by former bassist / vocalist Richard Chappell, whose writing personifies the group. Along with the album’s running theme of love and despair, is that of recognizing one’s own dark sides and developing those shadows into something one can control,...

Mick's Jaguar

Fame And Fortune

Riding Easy

Rock and roll is dead in New York City. Long live New York City rock and roll. Mick’s Jaguar is bringing noisy, wild, unafraid big rock back to NYC. Crazy rents, corporatized venues, and kids listening to DJs: it’s hard being a band in this town.   This isn’t LA and Mick’s Jaguar is a product of their environment: a windowless dungeon practice space twenty feet below the trash covered sidewalk of the Lower East Side. Rats, grime, the sounds of the city; the band gleefully pillages the history of rock music to create thoroughly modern, but classic rock and roll. Not quite punk, but not metal either, this is hard rock and roll that’s been put through the brain blenders of six musicians who pair their Judas Priest shirts with Steely Dan hats. They claim no musical lineage to New York—they just live there. The night AC/DC played CBGB’s would be about as close a comparison as one can get.   The three guitarists—yes, three guitars—open the album with a riff of buzzsaw intensity that would make a Ramone proud. But then like Jim Morrison sashaying into a wine shop, it drunkenly careens into a big sounding rock and roll album somewhere in between Van Halen and Tres Hombres. Songs about life, death, cars, blood, murder, sex, drugs and booze are their world. Recorded in Brooklyn at Figure 8 Recording by engineering wizard Philip Weinrobe, and fueled by a steady diet of Allen’s Coffee Brandy, the Fame...

Svvamp

Svvamp 2

Riding Easy

Swedish trio Svvamp’s self-titled debut was a breath of fresh air—unpretentious and free, primordial homespun classic rock that landed in the Top 20 Albums of 2016 in the Doom Charts consortium of writers and radio. The most common remark was how genuine and uncontrived it sounded, unlike most bands that posture and mimic the sounds of yesteryear.  So, it may be hard to grasp how fully realized the band sounds on Svvamp 2, while still sounding as laid back as their debut. Perhaps it can be partly attributed to the band’s jump from self-recording on a four-channel cassette deck to self-recording on a comparatively expansive SIX-channel system. That’s two whole more tracks to fill up! The obvious comparison to the groundbreaking psychedelic albums of the late ’60s, when artists began experimenting with studios moving from four, to eight to sixteen tracks, is fitting here too.  Svvamp is three friends—Adam Johansson, Henrik Bjorklund and Erik Stahlgren, all of whom share lead vocal duties—drawn together for the sake of jamming and a love of rock, folk and blues. Their resulting heavy psych sound bears hints of Cream, Eric Bell-era Thin Lizzy, CCR and Crazy Horse. “We definitely wanted to mix styles and genres, so the music stays interesting for the band, like the first record,” Johansson says. “Our approach is still fairly straightforward and live. And, all of us sharing lead vocal duties solidifies that the band consists of three equal members.”

Here Lies Man

You Will Know Nothing

Riding Easy

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Here Lies Man took the music world by storm in 2017 with their self-titled debut positing the intriguing hypothesis: What if Black Sabbath played Afrobeat? Rough Trade named that album in their prestigious Top 10 Albums of 2017. BBC 6 and Classic Rock Magazine deemed it among the year’s best, as well as countless other press outlets singing its praises. This June, the L.A. band comprised of Antibalas members quickly follow their auspicious debut with the even more thoroughly realized album You Will Know Nothing. Its eleven tracks expand upon the band’s exploration of heavy riff-based rock and psych within the ancient rhythmic formula of the clave. Sonically, the dynamic range is thicker, crisper and more powerful on this album. It glistens as much as it blasts. The songs are even catchier, more anthemic, and the production reflects that of a band truly come into its own. While it also certainly maintains its gritty grooves, there’s an interesting conceptual mathematics to the entire proceedings. “There are interludes between each song that are 2/3 to 3/4 of the tempo of the previous song,” vocalist / guitarist / multi-instrumentalist Marcos Garcia says. “The reason it breaks down to 2 over 3 or 3 over 4 is that everything in the music rhythmically corresponds to a set of mathematical algorithms known as the clave. The clave is an ancient organizing rhythmic principle developed in Africa.” Lyrically, the album is also an equally more conceptualized effort that reflects upon...

Death Wheelers

I Tread On Your Grave

Riding Easy

***BACK IN STOCK ON PURPLE VINYL!!!  Heavily inspired by the aesthetics and ethos of bikesploitation movies such as The Wild Angels, Werewolves On Wheels and Psychomania, The Death Wheelers seek to glorify this unsung era of movie-making through their sordid sounds. Taking musical cues from rock greats Davie Allan, The Cramps, Motörhead, The Stooges, and Grand Funk Railroad, they make zero compromises when it comes to laying down the groove. Through their bare-bones, stripped down, jammy approach of sleaze ’n’ roll, this instrumental Canadian quartet pushes listeners to their deepest, filthiest carnal / sexual desires. I Tread On Your Grave is more than just an album—it’s a soundtrack to a wild B-movie in the mind, following this truly awesome plot synopsis: Decimated in 1972 by local authorities, all members of The Death Wheelers, a notorious motorcycle club, have been buried at the Surrey cemetery. But the time has come and they have risen for their last ride. They’re back from the grave and they’re hungry for blood! Nothing can stop this gang of living dead from recruiting new members as they travel coast to coast to find the filthiest, nastiest, trashiest individuals to join their ranks. Their goal, assemble a legion of thirteen “discycles” (disciples + cycles) to seek revenge on the pigs that dismantled the club and send them to their graves. The cycle of violence continues...

V/a

Brown Acid - The Sixth Trip

Riding Easy

Six volumes worth of licensed tracks released in just three years: doing the Dark Lord’s work isn’t an easy job, but somebody’s gotta do it, so here is Brown Acid - The Sixth Trip, with more lined up. The heads just can’t get enough obscure hard rock, heavy psych, and proto-metal from the late‘60s and ‘70s!  This time around Riding Easy present ten deep cuts from across the continental USA and one from the neighbors up North. This trip kicks off with an outrageous number from Gold out of San Francisco circa 1970. The band used to open their sets with this over-the-top frantic jammer which is absolutely mind-blowing! Delving deeper into the depths, Canadians continue to prove that they could bang heads with the best of ‘em! Heat Exchange from Toronto released the rollicking ripper “Inferno” on the Yorkville label way back in 1968 and it’s still thumping almost fifty years later. Some more examples of the mind-melting tracks on this platter: Missouri isn’t a state that brought us a lot of heavy 45s, but there are a handful of outstanding tracks, one of which is the funk-laced anthem “Give Me Time” by Backwood Memory from Kansas City. Youngstown, Ohio, meanwhile, might have been the Hard Rock Mecca back in the day. Travis is yet another Youngstown group that aimed to get asses out of seats and out in the streets. Truth & Janey had their incredible proto-metal masterpiece 1976 album No Rest For The Wicked; released four...

BlackWater HolyLight

S/t

Riding Easy

***Back In Stock on Green Vinyl!!!  The notion of “heavy music” is continuing to expand of late, with many intrepid artists finding new ways to incorporate the power of traditional metal into new music, but without all of its trappings. Enter Portland, OR quartet BlackWater HolyLight to further swirl musical elements into a captivating hybrid of emotional intensity. Heavy psych-riffs, gothic drama, folk-rock vibes, garage-sludge and soaring melodies all collide into a satisfying whole with as much contrast as the band’s name itself. “I wanted to experiment with my own version of what felt ‘heavy’ both sonically and emotionally,” says founder and vocalist/bassist Allison Faris. “I also wanted a band in which vulnerability of any form could be celebrated.” The band—Faris, guitarist / vocalist Laura Hopkins, drummer Cat Hoch and synth player Sarah Mckenna—formed upon the breakup of Faris’ longtime band and she sought a fresh start. “In my last band I was the only female in a group of six, so I wanted to see how my song writing and vulnerability could glow taking the driver’s seat and working with women.” Throughout this self titled debut, the band’s songs shirk traditional verse-chorus-verse structure in favor of fluid, serpentine compositions that move with commanding grace. The band expertly, yet subconsciously, incorporates hints of Chelsea Wolfe, Celebration, Captain Beefheart, The Raincoats, The Stooges, Pink Floyd, Jane’s Addiction and more to form their unique brand of dark ’n’ heavy transcendence.

Spiny Normen

S/t

Riding Easy

Spiny Normen were an incredible mid-’70s Houston hard rock, progressive, psychedelic rock band that featured mellotron, Vox Jaguar, crunchy, heavy guitars, flute with echo effects, and lots more. A totally lost relic, this self-titled album was recorded at a community college and never released. The recording is very English, dark, mysterious and proggy, but also very acid-drenched.  “Circa 1976, Gerry [Diaz] and I would skip class, smoke whatever scrap of contraband we could scrape together and meet in the high school auditorium where there was a piano and bang out crunchy rhythms. Gerry was playing guitar, listening to Alice Cooper, hair down to his back and about the only Mexican-American in a white bread school. He was cool! So when he said one day, ‘Hey man we should jam some time,’ I was stoked. I found an ancient Vox Jaguar that had belonged to Fever Tree and a Kustom amp that I blew out just right, that made the most beautiful distortion, accompanied by a beloved phase shifter. Over the next three years we began to experiment, spending months penning intense, bizarre, surreal and mind-affecting pieces influenced by King Crimson, Pink Floyd, film soundtracks, Van Der Graaf Generator, and the like. I was collecting keyboards: a mellotron, a single-key-play Moog... Gerry was adding echos, early guitar, synth and tons of pedals. I learned the flute. In we went with a hired stand-up bass player and little engineering knowledge to the community college 8-track recording studio and just played like...

V/a

Brown Acid - The Fifth Trip

Riding Easy

***BACK IN STOCK!!! The hits just keep coming—for this fifth lysergic journey, Riding Easy assembles ten heavy slabs of obscure rock the likes of which have never been seen before… not in this form, anyhow. And as usual, the tracks from these impossibly rare records have all been fully cleared through the artists themselves. Great lengths were gone to in order to get the best possible master sources, the worst case scenario being an original 45. The legendary Captain Foam kicks off this trip like an anvil to your skull with a rollicking stomper sounding like The Who with Matt Pike’s thunderous guitar tone. “No Reason” wasn’t easy to find, but lo and behold, the super sleuths located him and got his blessing to include the A-side of his sole single. Good luck finding an original copy of the record. It’s rarer than raw beef—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The other nine tracks continue the onslaught in typical Brown Acid form: George Brigman’s charmingly disjointed bedroom-fi production of “Blowin’ Smoke,” Finch’s way out of time and place grungeadelic anthem “Nothing In The Sun,” Cybernaut’s heavy prog, Fargo’s hallucinogenic BBQ-sauce soaked “Abaddon,” Mammoth’s fittingly beefy eponymous riff-monger, Flasher’s “Icky Bicky” boogie, Ohio-based screamers Lance, Zebra’s gritty rendition of “Helter Skelter” and finally, the mysterious and previously unheard Thor appears here exclusively and for the first time ever with their unknown 45 track “Lick It.”

R.I.P.

Street Reaper

Riding Easy

When R.I.P. came crawling out of the sewers of Portland, Oregon, last year, their grimy, sleazy street doom was already a fully formed monstrosity, quickly infecting the minds of everyone it encountered. Now, borne from the band’s declining mental health and an increased focus on songwriting, Street Reaper is even more unhinged and menacing than their debut In The Wind. Borrowing equally from ’80s Rick Rubin productions and Murder Dog magazine aesthetics, this latest album is a streamlined yet brutally raw manifesto of heavy metal ferocity hearkening to the era when both metal and hip hop were reviled as the work of street thugs intent on destroying America’s youth. Throughout, Angel Martinez’s guitar and John Mullett’s bass are inextricably interlocked like a massive sonic steamroller, while drummer Willie D keeps the beat solid and simple for the most powerful impact. Plus, the band’s extensive touring and excessive virgin sacrifices have provided singer Fuzz evermore agile vocal chords to drive it all home with extreme precision. Operating on the belief that doom is not tied to a tuning or a time signature, but rather a raw and terrified feeling, R.I.P. eschews well-trodden fantasy and mysticism tropes of the genre and focuses on conveying the horror and chaos inherent in the everyday reality of the human mind.

Monolord

Rust

Riding Easy

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Monolord encompasses and transcends genre — a vortex of heavy rock density that consumes all others. Their thunderous, tuneful heft has built a rabid international fanbase since their 2014 debut. But Rust, the band’s third full length, truly justifies why some refer to them as the Nirvana of doom. The band’s enveloping, syrupy sludge is a vibe, a state of mind. Not riffs for riffs’ sake, but a collective buzzing, rattling and rumbling that’s more total environment than collection of songs. Guitarist / vocalist Thomas Jäger, drummer Esben Willems, and bassist Mika Häkki create a massive, dynamic sound with ultra-low frequencies serving as a fourth member. Album opener “Where Death Meets the Sea” perfectly exemplifies their mastery of dynamics and hooks: a driving, infectious buzzsaw riff that lesser bands would ride off into the sunset, but they use to subtly spur the skull rattling core ever onward. This tight rhythmic unit sounds like an early ZZ Top record played at half speed. “Dear Lucifer” squeals and hums with slow deliberation as Willems summons Dale Crover with chasm-like low-tuned toms and syncopated cymbal crashes. The album’s title track is also its centerpiece, opening with a dramatic, shimmering Hammond organ intro followed by the band kicking in with a bellowing line downtuned to B that nosedives as the drums hammer down for the kill.

Spelljammer

Inches From The Sun

Riding Easy

Riding Easy Records presents a domestic reissue on CD and first time vinyl pressing of this celebrated Swedish trio’s 2010 debut album Inches From The Sun—a groove based hybrid of classic Desert Rock and rumbling European doom that launched the band to international acclaim! “Spelljammer is some sort of hybrid between Acid King and a balls-kicking machine that has been buried in the sand outside Kyuss’ rehearsal ‘space’ just waiting to be unbleached.” —PlanetFuzz “Here is yet another pretty amazing Stoner Rock band from Sweden, and man do these guys really deliver the goods. Slow, bass-heavy, and insanely fuzzed-out stoner doom jams are what this band is all about.” —Heavy Planet “This is for fans of Sleep, Lowrider, Kyuss, Slo-Burn and Acid King, but if this is a debut, one can foresee only great things for this band, including the overcoming of the masters!” —Sludge Swamp

Shooting Guns

Flavour Country

Riding Easy

While Canadian sextet Shooting Guns is known (and oft-nominated) for their film soundtrack work (like Netflix hit WolfCop), Flavour Country is the band’s fastest, heaviest and most visceral material—a collection of anthems to jettison from this universe into the multiverse. The album features some of the band’s most atmospheric sounds: there are slight hints of Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western twang amidst the looping Meddle-era Pink Floyd heavy psych and driving drone reminiscent of Bobby Beausoleil’s belladonna laced soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising. But for the most part, the band is out for blood, regardless of tempo. Album opener “Ride Free” kicks off with a blistering wall of guitars, blaring and rattling out of the gate like mutant progeny to fellow Canadian biker-rock heroes Steppenwolf duly firing all of the guns, exploding into space and returning to hunt down every last one of us. It accelerates from there: “French Safe” sounds like an unhinged battalion of musicians driving full throttle like a scene from a George Miller Road Warrior movie. Biting, lengthier tracks like “Simian Shelf” and the title track occupy the heavy end of the psychedelic spectrum, haunting the foggy moor between early, bluesy Sabbath-styled doom riffery and heavy pulse-riding kraut-rock.

Dunbarrow

Dunbarrow

Riding Easy

Summoned to play it the old way in a new age, Trondheim, Norway quintet Dunbarrow draws inspiration from freezing winter nights, unpolished demo tapes from the ’70s and Swedish throwback rock from the beginning of the 21st century. The result is Norwegian proto-doom with a back-to-basics sound, from Pentagram and Witchfinder General to Quicksilver Messenger Service. The band’s clean, unadorned sound shares the unpretentious brilliance of classic heavy progenitors playing basements and barns, before the big budgets and bloated habits diluted hard rock into an echo chamber awash in reverb and layered in distant, screeching hobbits. This nine-track self-titled album is a classic: every song is instantly recognizable after just one listen.

Blackout

The Horse

Riding Easy

Ask any New Yorker what makes them special and they’ll all tell you something different. But there’s something very particular about a city so condensed with a vast range of humanity all facing myriad, daily challenges that gives its rock music a brash, direct aggression unlike other places. Case in point: NYC trio Blackout’s take on doom and stoner rock is filled with a gritty, mechanistic heft unlike bands of their ilk from anywhere else. Subsumed within the greasy grooves of The Horse are echoes of NYC heavy legends like Helmet, Cro-Mags, Judge, Prong and others—not as an intentional homage, but rather a vibe that permeates and inadvertently gives it a unique power few can match. After a brief hiatus between the March 2015 release of their self-titled sophomore album on Riding Easy Records, the band has regrouped and (ahem) gotten back on The Horse for an eight-song blast of riffs that does not fuck around. It was recorded over four days in September 2016 at Spaceman Sound in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, a whirlwind session laced with loads of buds, Petey’s burgers and lipstick. What you have before you now is a messy plate of meat, slathered in weird sauces. A haunted steak from from Centaurus A to sink your tingling fangs into. Sit back, crack a semi cold one, maybe get some snacks… and turn this motherfucker up to 8.

V/a

Brown Acid - The Fourth Trip

Riding Easy

If you thought Riding Easy was getting close to the end of the Brown Acid series with their last Trip, you were dead wrong. They’re only just getting rolling. The well of privately released hard rock, heavy psych, and proto-metal 45s is deep and nowhere near tapped out. Most of these records, barely released and never properly distributed, were never easy to find, unless you’re willing to dig. Hard calluses have formed from handling the shovel and sifting through a lot of dirt, but here are another ten tremendous tracks to share with all the heavy heads out there. This volume brings together eight insanely rare and skullcrushingly heavy 45s as well as two previously unreleased bangers. The records included on this volume vary in rarity, but at least two of them were virtually unknown until Riding Easy discovered them. You’ll win the lottery before you find copies of all of the original 45s in even the best record stores. Many of those included in this volume are owned only by the members of the bands and some of the band members don’t even have personal copies. That’s just how hard these guys hit it back in the day! It’s lucky some of these guys are still alive and well enough to give permission to use their masters. Brown Acid is here to stay—plug in, turn up, and freak out, this is what rock ’n’ roll is all about!