“Portable Shrine” by Earth Tongue

Our Day 28 song for 31 Days of May Madness, attempting to post a New Zealand track every day of the month of May, is “Portable Shrine” by Earth Tongue:

Heavy doom-rock duo Earth Tongue’s music is built around thick gooey low-frequency fuzzy riffs, and doomy sci-fi inter-planetary travel theme lyrics.  

It’s a bit too weird – in an agreeably H E A V Y psych-rock/ prog-rock/ space-rock kind of way – to be doom-metal, but it certainly shares some of the ominous frequencies of that genre at the same time as being a convoluted and interesting feast of restless rhythms, riffs and melodies.

Earth Tongue are guitarist/ vocalist Gussie Larkin and drummer/ vocalist Ezra Simons. Larkins is also one third of Mermaidens. 

“Nick Cave’s Moustache” by Space Bats, Attack!

Space Bats, Attack! is the mutant brainchild of Dunedin guitarist and pedal inventor Lee Nicholson (Thundercub). He’s joined for this sonic trip through the deep space of psych-drone-prog-sci-fi-rock by Josh Nicholls (A Distant City) on drums and Richard Ley-Hamilton (Males, Mr Biscuits, Kilmog) on 2nd guitar and now Sam Hood (T54) on bass.

“Nick Cave’s Moustache” is from an upcoming album, which has been upcoming for quite a while. It’s monstrous, thundering and adds all sorts of interesting layers and sonic twitches to the psych-drone school of guitar-based noise-rock.

While we are with Space Bats, Attack! the first song from this upcoming album was a track called “DTY” back in 2013.

Someone unknown by the band put the song to a video made by a US videographer. Let’s put to one side the dubious legality and/or morality of taking someone’s music and some else’s video and combining them to post on YouTube and simply marvel at how well this works as a music video for a great, short burst of fabulous noise.