People from that weird punk band DRY ROT, are now making music under the banner of URANIUM ORCHARD. And I’ll tell you, this is a strange record from this band out of Ventura, CA. Each song sounds like a honed experiment. There’s 17 of them on the record, and there is an amazing flow between them, from mournful sounding indie rock something, to metal or near-metal riffing, to punk/hc moments sometimes recalling the band that two of these fellows comes from. There are also heavy doses of psychedelic strangeness, and constant and varied diversions into rock experimentation. In total here we have a maximization of what an ALBUM can be, a journey, a trip, a band knowing what they are doing and really going for their own sound. It just has that feel of “these guys have been playing together for years and just know each other so well.” “Huddled Flesh” is one of the more indie rock sounding tunes. Hushed vocals drift over beautiful spinning, and tangled 90s sounding guitar. Verse gives way to an amazing, simplistic chord progression that nevertheless comes off as extremely powerful. “Eastern Digital 1” is some kind of crazy sample of a woman talking of “underworlds” as whacked out keyboards travel beneath her crazy person jabberjaw. As jabberjaw goes it’s pretty intriguing though. “Pseudocide” gets nasty, with some heavy riffs, spaced out vocals, and ripping guitar tangents. This record touches so many places. I feel whole. It’s called 1ST LP and it’s out on COLD VOMIT RECORDS. I was going to stop there but I’m listening to the tune “Hesitation Pitch” now and it presents a whole other right on angle to this band’s sound that I didn’t even touch upon, so I feel as if I must mention it. It starts off post-punk, jagged guitar chord riffery, opens up into another indie rock emotive passage, and then there’s the sound of tape warping, melting? and the riff they were just working on emerges once again clearly from a different recording, sounding even better than it just did. A simple move, but I’ve rarely heard it employed midway through a song. And for some reason I really love it. No doubt headed toward best of the year lists. Hope to have them to Boston one day.