I love this album.
In a Dutch Haze is the appropriately named live album of Earthless's set with Heavy Blanket at Roadburn Festival in 2012. Earthless are a band I've really gotten into since seeing at Primavera Sound in 2015; Heavy Blanket I know nothing about, other than that J Mascis from Dinosaur Jr plays guitar. In January this year, Norman Records had one of their large clearout sales on, and I bought a lot of cool music. One such purchase was this live album.
It's worth noting that this is no regular live album. Over four sides of vinyl we have exactly one song, called Paradise in a Purple Sky. It is an hour long and incredible throughout. Despite only buying it at the start of the year I've already played it more than some albums I bought years ago. It didn't come with a download code, but Amazon or Google Music were selling the digital version of the album for £1 (since it's only one song, and the algorithms haven't yet figured out how to price stoner metal), which was too good an offer to pass up; as a result, it has had a lot of airtime at work. Turns out I get a lot done when listening to heavy, freaky hour-long jams.
Ordinarily I might talk about my favourite songs on an album, but here there are just parts that blow my mind slightly more than others. By the end of the first side they're already thrashing things out and you wonder how they can keep things as intense for the next 45 minutes. About halfway through the second side things simmer down a bit for a while, but Mario is still pounding away at the drums carrying things forward, and even that doesn't last long before they're ramping things up again. It'd be easy to think that one song that lasts an hour might be boring, but that's possibly the most exciting thing about this song - I never get bored, I never think "wow, this has been going on for a while". Earthless write long songs generally, but it seems there is no upper limit for how long their songs can be. And I like that.
Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 1
Cost: £16 new
Bought: Norman Records
When: 15/01/19
Colour: Yellow
Etching: none
mp3s: no
