white hills: so you are...so you'll be

The album is a blazing totem of rock & roll empowerment and will to power achievement, as if overseen by the spirit of Nietzsche wearing leather trousers, mirror shades, a well fitted Cuban shirt and wielding a Flying V. Building on the solid foundations laid by last year’s excellent Frying On This Rock, they went back to BC Studios, Brooklyn to record once more with Martin Bisi. This time they could easily have released a great triple album but felt that they would sooner abandon most of the material in order to get the most concentrated blast of White Hills at their fullest potential possible onto one disc. After the deconditioning and deprogramming blast of electronic noise which is ‘InWords,’ the album opens properly with the call to arms, ‘In Your Room’ – a skyscraper razing slab of Mudhoney strength mantra metal, which bids you abandon all doubt and fear so you can start your quest into inner space. For tuned in, turned on heads there is ‘The Internal Monologue’, an ecstatic shivering sliver of celestial acidic drone followed by the post-Hawkwind, post Loop transmission of ‘So You Are… So You’ll Be’. There is more computerised deprogramming via ‘OutWords’ before White Hills command that you cower before the altar of the Stoogian proto-riff, the holy Ur-riff, the mind warping, silver machine-tooled hyper riff, that is ‘Forever In Space (Enlightened)’. But after this cataclysmic shock, there is barely time to process what just happened before you are lowered into the howling lysergic swamp rock of ‘Rare Upon The Earth’ with only the echoing synthesized landscape of ‘Circulating’ offering some respite. The album builds effortlessly to the sumptuous ‘MIST (Winter)’ which features a John Carpenter synth line engine inserted into glistening La Dusseldorf chassis, forming some kind of god-like chariot.