Psychedelic rockers Harsh Toke explore sound and space through music. on the San Diego Acid Rock band's 2013 debut album Light Up And Live, loud, heavy guitars, swimming bass lines and smashing drums warp to full throttle, cranking insanity, working together to launch the red hot group's unapologetic and unsophisticated Psychedelic Blues into interstellar overdrive. Led by ripping pro skater and rip-roaring guitarist Justin 'Figgy' Figueroa, Harsh Toke are equal parts atmospheric and anarchic, merging raging, blind fury musicianship with unprecedented white-knuckle volume abuse. Tense and surreal, Harsh Toke's songs slowly build from hallucinatory haze into grand overtures of noise and feedback; a cosmic buffet of pounding, pummeling and punishing as if the ocean itself belched forth ornery, astral planes of sound. Heavy. Cosmic. Kinetic.
''Harsh Toke's space-rock will take your mind on a cosmic journey through the rings of Saturn and back again. They've transcended the plateau of time and space and their galactic forefathers from the '70s underground would be very proud to call them their own. Inhale deep and take it down you sissy.'' ----Front
With a name like Harsh Toke, you might know what you're in for. Heavy, relentless blues-metal guitar in constant jam mode with no off switch? Pounding drums and fuzzy, incense smoke-reeking basslines? Swimming psychedelia of the most impaired variety? Harsh Toke deliver all of the above on their self-titled debut full-length album, with just four tracks stretching into some cosmic exploration over the album's 40-odd minute running time. Like a hazy dream, the band segue from the Sabbath-worshiping album-opener ''Rest in Prince'' directly into a breakdown of random percussion and watery flutes on the beginning of the epic suite ''Weight of the Sun,'' which transitions from its gentle Popol Vuh-reminiscent beginnings into a loopy, narcotic blur of delayed guitars and screaming organ nightmares. Clearly from the same school of jamming and mind expansion that gave us great albums like Sleep's ''Dopesmoker,'' but dialing back the heavy doom and dread that characterized that record, Harsh Toke gets into stoner jams as unhinged, ecstatic, and wandering as some of the greats. There's a slight cartoonishness that comes with the revivalism of acid rock's early days, but despite weed-centric titles like ''Light Up and Live,'' Harsh Toke mostly keep the focus on their restless, druggy rhythms and the interplay between guitarist Justin Figueroa's endless edge-of-the-world soloing and vocalist/organist Gabe Messer's psychedelic keyboard washes. The band even get into more outlandish territory on the ten-minute album-closer ''Plug Into the Moon,'' with the addition of a saxophone player as wild and unglued as the rest of the band in his epic jamming. The song recalls the same wanton, desperate energy of ''L.A. Blues,'' the sax/noise closer to the Stooges ''Fun House,'' and it constructs similar walls of unhinged noise, menace, and transcendence with its barrage of sound. ----All Music Guide, November, 2013
If you are a band member or are involved with this record and don't want people to see/hear this, please contact me via comments or Google+ message and I'll remove it. There's no need for flags.
I do not own any copyright nor have anything to do with the band or their label. Just spreading their music/job.
