The Sludgelord: Vista Chino - Peace. Vista Chino Peace Napalm Records 3 September 2. The band: John Garcia - vocals Bruno Fevery - guitars Brant Bjork - drums Nick Oliveri - bass The songs: 1. Good Morning Wasteland 1: 0. Dargona Dragona 4: 5. Vista Chino - Peace review: It's a different album, yet unmistakably Kyuss. They effectively capture the feel of the desert rock they made famous. Focusing more on.
Vista Chino - Peace - Album Review Vista Chino. They keep it at mid-tempo still when launching into Barcelonian but build it up and letting it kind of. Peace is a hard rock music album recording by VISTA CHINO released in 2013 on CD, LP/Vinyl and/or cassette. This page includes VISTA CHINO Peace's : cover picture. It proves to be charming trait of songs like the blissfully up-beat . Peace for Vista Chino. Sweet Remain 3: 1. As You Wish 5: 0. Planets 1 & 2 6: 4. Adara 4: 4. 6 7. Mas Vino 1: 2. Dark And Lovely 6: 2. Barcelonian 3: 3. Acidize- The Gambling Moose 1. Talk about pressure and anticipation! When all legal bullshit was over and done with news started to filter through that Kyuss Lives! I doubt anyone into heavier music have missed the legal battle and rift between the touring incarnation Kyuss Lives! The judge prevented John Garcia and Brant Bjork to record under the name Kyuss Lives! However, they decided to change the name and got down to business and entered a studio and recorded Peace. Naturally everybody and their mother got excited about this upcoming release expecting I'm sure a very Kyuss- sounding piece of wax. Of course with John Garcia singing it's going to have those traits and musically there some traits of that. But mainly Peace is a more jazzy, groovy and laid back affair. I have to admit it took me a while to warm up to it since I guess I expected the low- end heaviness and desert spaciness from this band's musical past. However, once everything clicked it actually is a very good release. An instrumental piece, Good Morning Wasteland, initializes Peace before Dargona Dragona picks it up. This is one of the most Kyuss- sounding track on the album although guitarist Bruno Fevery definitely puts his own mark on it making it Vista Chino. Sweet Remain has a kind- of Mot. Jazzy and with odd time signatures thanks to mainly Brant Bjork's drumming As You Wish definitely brings out Vista Chino's own sound and this one track that took me a while to grasp. Now though I really dig it's trippy and spacey acid- like structure.. I mean. Planets 1& 2 has a very Kyuss- like approach just like Dargona Dragona but this is mainly in the music as John Garcia actually sings differently. What I mean is he has stepped away from his trademark phrasing and from- the- balls bellowing. He kind of holds back and this actually makes the song darker but it works really good. Rolling to a backbone of tribal drumming and some jazzy spaced- out guitar playing Adara is groovy, slower shroom- trip before kicking in during the choruses. Following a real cool bass line from Nick Oliveri the band continues along the free- form outline of jazz and a bit of blues in the instrumental interlude that is Mas Vino. Dark And Lovely picks up from there although Vista Chino ups the tempo slightly.. Fevery lets off some deft guitar work in the solos and I dig it big time. You can call this their blues track alright. They keep it at mid- tempo still when launching into Barcelonian but build it up and letting it kind of explode in the end. Last song out is Acidize- The Gambling Moose and it's by far the longest track on Peace clocking in at a little over 1. Starting out slow and transcendent almost like you're in the build up of an acid trip Vista Chino goes all out around the 4: 3. As soon as it started it's over and the tempo is brought down giving off paranoid vibes before switching over to tripped- out blues. Heavy, heavy heavy.. I can say! And damned good you hear! Like I said earlier it took me some time to understand Peace but once I did what on display is a fantastic album. Just take your time and give it a chance. I have a feeling that reviews for it are going to 5. After all, we are all entitled to our opinions and that's how it should be. But I also think most of the haters expected/wanted the album to be as close to Kyuss as possible which it clearly isn't. True there are parts that resemble the godfathers of Stoner Rock but Vista Chino aren't out to play it safe. Instead they are doing the right thing by walking the thin line and create their own unique sound. All I can say in conclusion is Peace is a great debut by band that can conquer the world! REVIEW: Vista Chino, Peace. Vista Chino has been a curious proposition from the start. As far as reunions go, I think even the members of Vista Chino would have to admit the circumstances that have led to their studio full- length debut, Peace(Napalm Records) have been convoluted and probably far less than ideal. What began as a Kyuss revitalization in the form of the John Garcia- fronted Garcia Plays Kyuss at the 2. Roadburn festival and gradually morphed into tours with former Kyuss bassist Nick Oliveri (also Queens of the Stone Age, Mondo Generator) and drummer Brant Bjork (also Brant Bjorkand the Bros., Che) with guitarist Bruno Fevery under the moniker Kyuss Lives!, Vista Chino wound up becoming Vista Chino as a result of a lawsuit that had former Kyuss guitarist Joshua Homme (who went on to bone fide rock stardom in Queens of the Stone Age) and bassist Scott Reeder as its plaintiffs. In this context, it’s just as easy to read the album title Peaceas a desperate plea as a relieved exhale. Perhaps it’s both. Whatever the case, this multi- tiered clusterfuck born out of the original reunion spearheaded by Garcia, initially on his own with members of European acts (including the Belgian- born Fevery), has led to new band Vista Chino — Garcia, Fevery, Oliveri (who plays on the album but has been replaced live by C. O. C. This is no small challenge, but whatever else Peaceis able to accomplish over the course of its 4. Then it sidesteps it and rocks out with abandon. However a Kyuss reunion might’ve played out in a perfect world, Vista Chino, who recorded Peaceat Thunder Underground in Palm Springs, handled the task before them the only way they could; they wrote a collection of honest songs that didn’t outwardly try to recapture what Kyuss was in its heyday, but invariably showed flashes of that owing to the involvement of Bjork, Garcia and Oliveri and the effect that being in Kyuss has had on their lives, better and worse. Perhaps most pivotal to the album’s ultimate success, nobody throughout Vista Chino. If anything, the name change brought on by legal mandate has allowed the group to begin the establishment of a new musical identity, and though Fevery. Maybe that new identity wasn’t what Vista Chino were looking to do when they started out as Kyuss Lives!, but it’s where they ended up all the same. The closest Vista Chino comes to directly referencing Kyuss on Peace is probably in the central riff of “Planets 1 & 2,” which seems to be nodding at “Green Machine” from Blues for the Red Sun — but even there,the band finds personality of its own as Bjork steps in to share vocal duties with Garcia, something that, though he contributed to the songwriting all along while he was in Kyuss (he left prior to the last album), he never did before. Likewise, songs like “As You Wish” and the sweetly open- spaced “Barcelonian” showcase a laid back heft that, though Kyuss touched on at times and one could easily argue had a hand in pioneering, is more mature in its presentation and sense of purpose than the members of Vista Chino could’ve been at a younger age. The inevitable tradeoff is that it’s not new anymore and that Vista Chino inherently cannot instantly show up and invent desert rock the way Kyuss is often credited with doing (of course the reality is more complex than the narrative; see also “Black Sabbath invented heavy metal”). It’s already been done. How do you, in putting tracks together, ignore that and proceed to make a record? I don’t know. And I don’t know what the division of songwriting labor on Peacewas between Bjork, Garcia, Fevery and Oliveri, how much of the album was written separately as opposed to together in a rehearsal space or in the studio, but at some point, these players stopped looking back at what Kyuss was able to spearhead and started looking forward at what Vista Chino might be able to do to make a mark on the form. That could be something as simple as the jam from which the shuffle of the later “Dark and Lovely” resulted, maybe. What matters is, it happened, and however a given listener might feel about the circumstances by which Vista Chino became Vista Chino, it’s to the ultimate benefit of Peacethat they did. To call these Kyuss songs would be to set a standard in the mind of anyone hearing them with a clue as to who Kyuss was that they invariably couldn’t meet. Peaceprobably wouldn’t work as a fifth Kyuss outing. As the first Vista Chino, it not only affirms the relevance in the craft and performance of the band, but it gives them a starting point from which they can expand on subsequent outings should they choose to do so, free of the restraints that an idea of “what Kyuss should sound like” might otherwise place on them. Had Garcia, Fevery, Oliveri and Bjork started out under the new name, it wouldn’t even be a matter of discussion. It’s fascinating to think of that as the feedback intro “Good Morning Wasteland” gives way to the driving “Dargona Dragona,” which is Peace. An album that only gets stronger and more complex as it plays out, “Dargona Dragona” provides Peacea mostly straightforward beginning, Fevery, Oliveri and Bjork starting out instrumentally before Garcia joins on vocals. When he does, his voice is more blown- out sounding than anywhere else on the record, presented with a kind of compression that cuts through the otherwise natural- sounding tones for the “ooh- ahh” chorus and seems high in the mix as a result. Though on the subsequent “Sweet Remain,” he pushes his range to what seems like as high and as guttural as it will go, on “Dargona Dragona,” the vocals are almost abrasive, even as the swirl and richness of fuzz the rest of the band creates is just beginning to establish itself. That can, for the first several listens, be off- putting — or at very least, off- throwing; which may well have been Vista Chino. The aforementioned “Sweet Remain” follows with Bjork setting the beat on drums as Fevery joins with a layered riff and winding lead while Oliveri rumbles with characteristic and creative fills underneath and Garcia recounts through the chorus lyrics what reads like a direct reference to the band’s legal struggles — “And they lost their souls/When they lost their way/Yeah, we fight to the bone/But the spirit remains” (or thereabouts). After work in Slo Burn, Unida, Hermano and guest spots on countless other bands’ albums across the world, John Garcia sounds perhaps most at home in these songs as he has since Kyuss. On “Sweet Remain,” he bleeds, and after a bouncing, gleefully insistent instrumental stretch, returns to ask, “And I wonder/Who’s fooling who/And I wonder/Who’s fooling you.” If nothing else, we glean that the sundry dramas surrounding the band are present on the minds of Vista Chino, and it was arguably much the same on Queens of the Stone Age. Following, “As You Wish” sticks to a similar lyrical thematic — the opening lines “Rise from ash/The phoenix comes” — but resides in a less hurried instrumental sphere, the bass prominent amid buzzsaw guitar and Bjork. On a general level, “As You Wish” is more indicative of the spirit of Peaceoverall, laid back, heavy, ultra- grooved and jammed- feeling but given to moments of propulsive riffing, topped with Garcia’s inimitable vocals. Most immediate, it makes a fitting lead- in for “Planets 1 & 2,” which not only is one of the most enjoyable tracks on Peacebut also, for Bjork taking the fore vocally, one of the stretches in which Vista Chino most carves out its own personality, separate from the legacy of Kyuss. As its title might indicate, “Planets 1 & 2” is essentially divided into two pieces, the first the far- off chugging groove that reinterprets the progression of “Green Machine” fronted by Bjork and the second propelled by a bigger, undulating riff on which Garcia takes over vocals. Both parties are continuing to work through the issues presented on the earlier tracks, but the riff that makes up most of the second part of the song serves as an apex for the first half and makes for one of Peace. The guitar provides a leading and similarly standout performance over the steadily building course of “Adara” at the end of side A, leading with a simple progression backed by percussion and a steady stream of drum fills that might’ve appeared in a slower form on one of Bjork. Bjork starts “Dark and Lovely” with a fill that opens to a shuffling boogie Fevery soon tops with welcome leads to transition to a verse the drummer and Garcia share in call and response fashion. The vibe is loose, and when Garcia takes the fore on lyrics later, they seem made up on the spot — and in that, “Dark and Lovely” calls to mind some of Kyuss. To finish, “Acidize/The Gambling Moose” is indeed divisible into two sections, more so even than “Planets 1 & 2,” though both play out with Garcia at the fore on vocals. At 4: 1. 6, they pick up with the same progression to give it a heavier take, and while it’s easy to think that might be the switch between “Acidize” and “The Gambling Moose,” don’t be fooled. Following a cymbal wash after the 5: 3. Fevery kicks off “The Gambling Moose” with Peace. The nod is immediate, the swagger righteous, and the cabaret potent enough that on an album chock full of quality riffs, this last one walks away with the title The Riff. Garcia enters a short while later with some lines about having his stash stolen, Fevery tops with a persistent lead that runs right through the verses, and if they do it anywhere, Vista Chino cap their first album by actually toying with the Kyuss legacy. Breaking to a different interpretation of the groove, harmonica arrives, and they build back to the groove from whence they came.
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