On their new album, Do You Fall?, Weeed is as progressive and eclectic as ever.
This is the Portland psychedelic rock group’s seventh full-length release and it radiates with an intense dexterity, maturity and an endless hunger for experimentation and discovery. Most of all, the record shines with a singular vision that successfully ties a vast variety of often disparate influences together into a confident and unified sound.
On songs like “Anicha”, the band melds Afropop rhythms with wah-wah-treated psychedelic blues licks into a trance-inducing rocker. Copious amounts of hand percussion and mantra-like lyrics work further to make this track one of the most mesmerizing moments on the entire LP.
Elsewhere on the album, you’ll find delicate acoustic fingerpicking, like on the bucolic “Something About Having Your Feet in the River,” breathtakingly tight prog jamming (“Reflection”) and fried folk psychedelia (“Path to Dhamma Khunja”).
However, what might be the biggest highlight here is the 13-minute “Rhythm on The Ground 1-4” suite. Throughout the song’s markedly different phases, the group combines African-flavored grooves with intertwining twin electric guitars and fluttering flute solos and mutates them through a prism of complicated jazz time signatures and trippy effects. At times, the track edges into the territories of bands like Horse Lords, 75 Dollar Bill and Rhyton. At other points, like during the suite’s third portion, the band explores prog folk/jazz folk zones that are reminiscent of the works of Pentangle, Gryphon and John Martyn. Despite these comparisons, Weeed still captures and retains a sound that is purely their own. This song, with all of its diverse sections, best represents the band firing on all cylinders with their minds and ears fully open to all kinds of musical opportunities and directions.
With an album this exploratory and beautiful, one can’t even begin to imagine where Weeed will go to from here. Click here to check it out for yourself today.
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