Need to have your synapses completely torched? Just try jamming out to the acid juggernaut that is Expo Seventy’s Evolution.
Released on Essence Music in a variety of different editions and formats, including a special art edition (which features a unique color vinyl and cover variant, a bonus live CD-R and handmade wearable trippy glasses, among other enticing goodies), Evolution is a thunderous slab of apocalyptic acid rock and nightmarish synth soundscapes. This is a record that grabs you by the jugular and pummels you from start to finish. If the searing guitar work and concussive drums don’t leave you feeling dizzy and disoriented, you’re just now listening to it loud enough.
Headed by Justin Wright, Expo Seventy is one of those power trios (not to be confused with Expo 70, which is Wright’s solo ventures) that somehow possess the power and volume of a band six times as large. On tracks like “Sucking the Chrome of a Tailpipe/Nebula Raga,” the group chugs along like an acid-fed doom metal beast, complete with volcanic riffs and howling solos on top of an avalanche of cataclysmic percussion.
Then on the record’s more subdued songs, like the sprawling “The Slow Death of Tomorrow,” the band executes the same foreboding atmosphere nearly through just dark synths and subtle percussion alone. If early Black Sabbath or the Fun House-era Stooges focused all of their intense energy into a single drone track, it might have sounded something like this.
Ominous, shadowy and enticingly cosmic, Expo Seventy’s Evolution is a stoner rock fever dream you’ll want again and again. Click here to get your copy now.
-KH