James Jackson Toth is a musical force to be reckoned with, and you're
either watching the tides that herald new offerings or you're left
wondering what all the fuss is about. RSTB has for a long time been
watching those tides ebb and flow, pulled by the moon, mortality,
desperation and drink and eventually hewn into rough toothed instruments
of creation and destruction that refuse to be hemmed in by genre or
expectation. On his third album with the group of musicians who jumped
aboard the Homewood Studio sessions that wrought
Briarwood, Toth
begins by shaving away some of the good vibes and large sound that
swaddled the last two records. He and the band, now dubbed The World War
IV, cut two distinct sides, and the first is rubbed raw, bone stark and
delivered with more than a little dirt in the teeth.
The second side takes the vitriol of the first and dissipates in a haze of
state fog and cigarette smoke. Laying back into the psych blues shamble
down pace that Toth knows well and then pairing it with some of his
most emphatic and tangled guitar work yet. These are the kinds of tracks
that shake down an encore and evolve into sixteen-minute exorcisms of
faith and fry and fuzz. The two humors of the album, yellow bile in a
tug-o-war with the phlegmatic drive, seem to set it somehow in perfect
balance. It fights and rests and finds it’s footing in a place that
feels at peace by the end.
