Stonegrass

A surprise return over the weekend from Canadian psych-stompers Stonegrass. The RSTB faves cull from the Cosmic Range collection of players, featuring familiar faces Jay Anderson, Matthew ‘Doc’ Dunn, and Asher Gould-Murtagh. The band’s second album picks up the blues soaked yoke where the band dropped it back in 2020. Their overlooked, but essential debut melded jazz with jam, a fusion of sweat-soaked psychedelics and bar band bliss that continues through the album’s successor. The new album blusters into view, leering and looming, a deadly concoction of riffs with a savage heart. The band’s expanded from the early days duo of Dunn and Anderson, and along with often-seen Dunn collaborator Gould-Murtagh, the bass of Harrison Forman turns the new album into a formidable battering ram of ribald rhythms baked in the Northern sun.

The new album leans even more on the blues as a blueprint, as evident in the swamp-meets-psychedelia song titles. Dirtier than your usual corner crushers, Stonegrass turns the 12 bar boogie into something sinister, soaked, and simmering. The collection here swerves from Tony McPhee to The Night Tripper, fogging the speakers with a humid, hectic brew of chooglin’ chops that prove just what the swampy advent of July needed. If you missed out on the debut salvo from the band back in the shut-in days of 2020, then it’s time to revisit their eponymous itcher with this one serving as the perfect part two to the eponymous album’s deep-end psych whirlpool.

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