Tracklist
1 | InWords | 0:25 | |
2 | In Your Room | 5:50 | |
3 | The Internal Monologue | 5:30 | |
4 | So You Are… So You'll Be | 7:28 | |
5 | OutWords | 0:55 | |
6 | Forever in Space (Enlightened) | 7:54 | |
7 | Rare Upon the Earth | 7:23 | |
8 | Circulating | 1:40 | |
9 | MIST (Winter) | 6:51 |
White Hills’ seventh studio album So You Are… So You’ll Be, features Dave W. on guitars, synthesizer and vocals, Ego Sensation on bass, synthesizer and vocals, and Nick Name on drums. The album is their most concentrated blast of psychedelic interstellar rock to date. Building on the solid foundations laid by last year’s excellent Frying On This Rock, they went back to BC Studios, Brooklyn to record once more with Martin Bisi (Sonic Youth, Swans), emerging with a concentrated blast of White Hills at their fullest potential.
So You Are.. is a blazing totem of rock & roll empowerment. After the deconditioning and deprogramming blast of electronic noise which is ‘InWords,’ the album opens properly with the call to arms, ‘In Your Room’ – a skyscraper razing slab of mantra metal, which bids you abandon all doubt and fear so you can start your quest into inner space. ‘The Internal Monologue’ is an ecstatic shivering sliver of celestial acidic drone followed by the post-Hawkwind transmission of ‘So You Are… So You’ll Be’. White Hills command that you cower before the altar of the the mind warping, machine-tooled riff that is ‘Forever In Space (Enlightened)’, but after this cataclysmic shock, there is barely time to process what just happened before you are lowered into the howling lysergic swamp rock of ‘Rare Upon The Earth.’ Only the echoing synthesized landscape of ‘Circulating’ offers some respite. The album builds effortlessly to the sumptuous ‘MIST (Winter)’ which features a John Carpenter synth line engine inserted into glistening La Dusseldorf chassis, forming some kind of god-like chariot.
The band has been touring heavily the last couple of years and are just coming off a national tour with Kylesa, followed by a stint in Europe. Their intense live performances caught the attention of director Jim Jarmusch, who not only used their music in upcoming film Only Lovers Left Alive, but had the band appear in the film, which premiered at Cannes in May. White Hills have set the international gold standard for what it means to be a space rock band in the 21st century: transportive, heavy, and uncompromising.