Country Ways

The San Franciscan four-piece CARLTON MELTON release Country Ways (Agitated), a new jam of gargantuan proportions. Featuring former ZEN GUERILLA members ANDY DUVALL (guitar and drums), RICH MILLMAN (guitar and synths), alongside BRIAN MCDOUGALL (drums (and JOHN STEURNAGEL (bass), Country Ways is their second album conjuring colossal riff laden dronescapes and parched psychedelically enhanced spacerock creating a mind altering magick carpet ride down the Californian highway. Loud, uncompromising, and yet not a blundering stoned beast, this album has levels of delicate pastoral San Franciscan psych blowing through the almost freeform spaced noise jam. Unlike many of their contemporaries, White Hills, Wooden Ships, Cave, Steve Hillage, Bardo Pond, White Noise Sound etc. Carlton Melton are less concerned with the pulse, rhythm, and the groove, as they are with the SOUND, and the VIBE, weaving lush, expansive sprawls of FX drenched psychedelic ambience; drifting more often than driving, huge clouds of swirling wah guitars, and minimal spare drumming, existing more as a pulse, than a beat the band drift weightless though swirling starlit sonic skies before the descent into trance inducing drones burrowing deep into the earth.