bong: s/t

Newcastle's stoner metal outfit Bong is mostly a live band, but the band's studio recordings all follow the same live path, jams around a central riff and a basic structure, shunning any overdubs and with minimal post-production. Influences most apparent are 1970s psychedelic rock groups (especially Parson Sound) and doom staples such as Come My Fanatics-era Electric Wizard and Sleep's Jerusalem. Slow, chanting vocals and spoken-word sections are drawn from the lands of fantasy writers like Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith and other dreamers' (/nerds') tales from the early 20th century, mirroring their stories of hashish-induced sojourns to outer worlds. Julian Cope has described Bong's music as sounding like "a hobbling Satori-period Flower Travellin' Band pulling the kind of moves that Faust did for Tony Conrad on Outside The Dream Syndicate or maybe the title track of Amon Düül (II)'s Yeti as performed by Tokyo's Far Out sitar 'n all."