CASSETTE REVIEW: The Cthulhus “Songs From the Slipstream ’09 – ‘11” (Juniper Tree Sounds)

The Cthulhus “Songs From the Slipstream ’09 – ‘11” (Juniper Tree Sounds)

http://junipertreesongs.bandcamp.com/album/jts003-songs-from-the-slipstream-09-11
http://junipertreesongs.bandcamp.com/

                Given the name of the cassette, one would have to conclude that this was a collection of songs put together after this band originally made them, sort of a greatest hits if you will, or maybe even after the band existed.   I don’t like to look into whether or not a band still exists or the exact back story on a release such as this; I prefer to just keep my imagination open.   But that has something to do with my entire view on music anyway, so it’s about time for a random confession, no?

                When I was in high school English class, we were taught about what the literary critics refer to as a “loss of innocence”.   This can happen in a number of different ways, but for me I feel like it came the day that I realized just what music was.  When I was young (and I don’t remember for how long exactly) I used to just hear music as music.   You’d listen to  a song and sing along or dance, whatever emotion it evoked in you.    But it had that sort of magic allure to it, where you just knew it as music and never really defined it because you never really had to define it.  

                Then I realized (or was taught/informed/ruined/whatever) that music can be made up of, for example, a guitar, bass and drums.   Once you know that, man, it’s all over.   From that point on in life, whenever you hear a song, you hear it completely differently.   The magic allure is gone and the music becomes, albeit still great, a sum of its parts.

                Very few other things in life will affect you this way.   There is only one other life changing instance I can think of right now, but I will save that for another review when it is even less relevant.  

                So I like to keep some of the mystery alive, yes.   So I believe maybe around 2012 or so The Cthulhus broke up for some reason (Does it really matter why a band breaks up?  They all come back to the same result, right?) and they had this collection of songs that they never really got to release properly for whatever reasons and so Juniper Tree Sounds decided to put out some of their selections recorded from 2009 to 2011.

                What you will hear on this tape, regardless of how accurate my guessed/made up story is, comes off being something between trippy rock n roll and fuzzy garage rock.   It’s not The Priests, because it has a lot more distortion and just an overall feeling that you should do a lot of drugs while listening to this music—or that the band was [Editor’s Note: Disclaimer about drugs, blah blah blah]

                It reminds me of “Purple” era Stone Temple Pilots at times and then you get a mellower song like “Sonic Doom Pt. 1” and you can hear some Lou Reed come out.   There are some lasers and there are even some Neil Young sounding moments.  

                Really, you could sum this up in combining two different genres: psychedelic rock and garage rock, but really, you’ve heard nothing that crosses those two genres like this before.   Especially having the cassette (Which I prefer for garage rock for obvious reasons), this is just something that if you are either a fan of garage rock or just rock n roll in general, you need this in your own personal music library.