This Place Is Haunted, by HIGH NOON KAHUNA

This Place Is Haunted

by HIGH NOON KAHUNA

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	Sidewalk Assassin 00:00 / 04:59

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Full Digital Discography

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Vile Vortices, Human Obsession, Malfeasant Codices, Mors Vincit Omnia, Les Transmissions Noires, Possession Subcosmique, Extended Agony, II: The Gifts of Wrath, and 101 more.

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1.	Atomic Sunset 05:53	buy track
2.	Lamborghini 02:58	buy track
3.	Prehistoric Love Letter 04:20	buy track
4.	Good Night God Bless 04:39	buy track
5.	The Devil's Lettuce 02:26	buy track
6.	Brand New Day 05:58	buy track
7.	Midnight Moon 02:41	buy track
8.	Sidewalk Assassin 04:59	buy track
9.	Mystical Shit 04:54	buy track
10.	Tumbleweed Nightmare 03:46	buy track
11.	Flaming Dagger 05:04	buy track
12.	Et Ita Factum Est 07:12	buy track

about

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.

Mangled distortion and luminous, moody Hammond organ hover over the mesmeric backbeat of "Atomic Sunset", the point of entry for Haunted's... other-worldliness. Heavy space-rock electronics swoop over ominous groove laced with desert-baked melody and Otis's strained, soulful howl. "Lamborghini" erupts from that heat-haze with a cruising instrumental that shifts into higher gear, only to give way to the sludgy pop mastery of "Prehistoric Love Letter" that unloads raucous, distortion soaked hooks and keening multi-part harmonies backed by the thunderous rhythm section. It’s quite possibly the catchiest thing I've ever heard from High Noon Kahuna, and channels my most beloved aspects of noisy, catchy, guitar-heavy rock from the early 1990s into a single gleaming chunk of haunting perfection. Which makes the majestic doom-laden crush of songs like "Midnight Moon " and "Good Night God Bless" all the heavier, their dark lumbering riffs strafed with wah-soaked leads and stomping tempos, washes of frantic noise and lysergic effects all descending into sinister psychedelic pandemonium, often surrounded by creepy creaking cacophony that coalesces into something akin to poltergeist activity.

This Place Is Haunted proceeds to push deeper into this strange haze, songs like "The Devil's Lettuce" laying out that Morricone-meets-Ventures guitar vibrato amid sprawls of narcotized trance-rock, alternating these deeply mesmeric instrumental explorations with harder, bittersweet noise-rock / gritty 'gazey numbers like "Brand New Day" and the ferocious "Sidewalk Assassin". And again, it's also some of their heaviest stuff yet: the crunching might of “Mystical Shit" sees Kahuna erupt into punishing locomotive power, an unstoppable central riff driving the band through the shadow-infested badlands, part Teutonic hyperdrive, part hypno-metal atavism. Throughout it all, Cogle and Goad's pummeling bass guitar and drumming lock together as a Gordian knot, creating a continuous hypnotizing backdrop of endless groove; through this, Otis unleashes a storm of spaced-out effects, meandering mournful melody, massive crushing riffs, and that inimitable lead guitar style that effortlessly blends the spikiness of early hardcore punk with his brand of "Spaghetti surf" that melts reverb and tremolo together into lush waves of sound. You can particularly hear that on the sensuous swaggering "Tumbleweed Nightmare", almost apocalyptic as its grim visions move through tremolo n’ reverb-soaked sun-bleached waste and into the slow-burn, looming instrumental intensity of "Flaming Dagger" that pushes onward into twilight and beyond. But the finality of "Et Ita Factum Est" leads the listener straight into midnight ritual, drawing together all of the huge 'gazy crush, tendrils of spectral and translucent guitar, bursts of stomping , droning riffage and bone-rattling rhythmic thud, summoning a vast, psilocybin-soaked blast of ghostly power-sludge that turns into a bizarre post-punk nightmare, dancing in tandem with towering flames, vague spindly figures obscured by the blackness, and weird witchy voices (courtesy of drummer Goad) wavering in the shadows, leaving everything, including you, touched by the numinous in the end.
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. more

credits

released May 17, 2024

Tim Otis: guitar / vocals
Brian Goad: drums / vocals
Paul Cogle: bass / vocals

Recorded with Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations

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Crucial Blast Hagerstown, Maryland

Crucial Blast is an independent underground label, online shop, and small press specializing in cutting edge, weird, and experimental heavy music and related cultural artifacts, with a particular focus on blackened avant-metal, nihilistic noise/industrial, dark ambiance, infernal psychedelia, hardcore improv/free-jazz, and experimental horror film / literature. ... more

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