Rangda, Major Stars, Sunburned Hand, holy shit!

So, after hardly going to a show all summer, I suddenly escaped my living room twice last week, first for Rangda, Major Stars, and Sunburned Hand of the Man at the Flywheel (reviewed below), and last night for Tortoise at the Iron Horse. Both really good. Still struggling with what to say about Tortoise, but my piece on Rangda ran this morning at Blurt. It begins:

We had ALL the guitars Thursday night.

Or at least that was how it seemed on a hot night in Easthampton. It was like all the guitars, all the pedals, all the guitar players had stepped onto a tilted board and slid helplessly towards the Flywheel. There were two of them in Sunburned Hand of the Man, three in Major Stars, two in Rangda (and at least one pretty famous one in the audience), and when they got going, in Sunburned's endlessly morphing drones, in Major Stars' psychedelic 1960s mayhem, or in Rangda's closing waterfall cascades of guitar notes, Sun City Girls' Richard Bishop and Six Organs Of Admittance's Ben Chasny locked together in the beautiful downward scales of "Plain of Jars," it could sound like an army. If you were looking for a guitar last Thursday and you were anywhere else, good freaking luck. You should have been at the Flywheel.

the rest

Here they are playing “Sarcophagi” in Dublin last summer.