US BOOKING AGENT - Angela Means @ Eclipse Bookings: [email protected]
AUSTRALIAN BOOKING AGENT - Robert MacManus @ Heathen Skulls: [email protected] (New email address)
AQUARIUS RECORDS (USA)
Online review from New Arrivals List
November 2006.
Grey Daturas
Path of Niners EP
Heathen Skulls 003
Australia's Grey Daturas are like our very own noise rock Santa Claus. They come about once a year, and every time they show up, they have a huge bag of sonic goodies. And while Santa probably doesn't come to punish our ear drums and pummel us to within an inch of our lives, crammed into some smokey sweaty little club, we'd probably have to take the Daturas over Santa any day!!! Unless this year is the year we finally get that pony...
This time, the band brought with them a brand new record, technically an EP, but at nearly 40 minutes it's plenty long enough to be a record proper. And as always it's a corker. Somehow, it seems to be their most structured and least chaotic, which in no way is a bad thing, nor does it mean that it still isn't packed freaked out noise rock or vast expanses of abstract psych guitar because it is. And then some.
The opener is definitely the Daturas at their most rock. Simple driving drums beneath an impossible dense swirl of HEAVY guitars, drenched in FX and churning wildly. It's like the blown out psych rock endless jam outro of every Hawkwind song jacked up and compressed into seven minutes. The rest of the record is a bit less rock, returning to their abstract noise rock ambience, like a heaver, more psychedelic Dead C, from abstract guitar jangle drift wrapped around random bits of drum flutter to an explosive noisrockmindfuck halfway through the disc, thick peals of distorted guitar that crash and crush but are almost immediately turned inside out and become a strange backwards guitar squall, all warped and warbly My Bloody Valentine / Teenage Filmstars blowout, with strange rhythms created from the ssssshhhhhht sound of the guitars being sucked through time in reverse. After that it gets a bit more minimal for a stretch, with some dark rumbling dronescapes, more snippets of backward guitar, distant swirling FX, some angular Sonic Youth style guitar rock until the final track, a massive and ultra dense guitarscape, rife with acidic riffs and distorted melodies, thick clouds of clang and rrrooooaaar, each guitar piled atop one another, layer after layer of rumbling, reverberating, shrieking, shimmering, coruscating steel string skree, a bit like Skullflower at their riffiest mashed up with Acid Mothers Temple at their least. Amazing.
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AQUARIUS RECORDS (USA)
Online review from New Arrivals List
August 2006.
Wolf Eyes / Grey Daturas
Black Plague Split Tour EP
Heathen Skulls 004
They may be thousands of miles apart, but it would take more than something like distance to keep these two forces of musical darkness from meeting and unleashing this Black Plague. AQ faves, Australian noise rockers the Grey Daturas, were visited recently by the US ambassadors of noise, Wolf Eyes. Never one to squander an opportunity to get together and kick up a ruckus, the Daturas dragged the Eyes into the studio, and both bands spent a few hours cooking up their own unique vision of sonic decay. Wolf Eyes came up with the 5 part "Post Civilization Muzak", 24 minutes of grrrrrrrrrrrinding post industrial brutality. Huge sheets of coruscating electronics, super distorted guitar, and wild streaks of white hot feedback, all tangled up into a blazing blood red supernova of sound.
The Grey Daturas counter with some musical density of their own. A bit more lo-fi, three long tracks, one a tangled freejazz grind psychnoise splatter, a blurred cloud of stuttery staggering freakout, another a slow plodding glacial sludge, with thick washes of abstract doom and simple tribal drumming and finally a full on far out post rock post punk instrumental epic, heavy and droney and massive. Pretty killer stuff.
Packaged in a glossy digipak and released on the Daturas' Heathen Skulls label. Includes a bonus Wolf Eyes track NOT included on the upcoming domestic lp version!!
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VOLCANIC TONGUE RECORDS (SCOTLAND / UK)
Online review from New Arrivals List
August 2006.
Yellow Swans / Grey Daturas
Copper Silver 2 x 12"
Olde English Spelling Bee OESB-07
Eye-bogglingly beautiful double vinyl upgrade for this all-time great Yellow Swans side that originally came out in a tiny CD-R run on Jyrk and sees them twined with Australian drug/rock unit Grey Daturas. One-time pressing of 525 copies in a deluxe 4-colour, pro-printed wraparound paste-on sleeve in classic folkways style and super-desirable. All tracks re-mastered and re-mixed with single tracks cross-fading into each other for maximum trip potential. Yellow Swans' recent form has been nothing short of jaw-juddering and this set is just so much fucking gravy for anyone who ever longed for an LP made up solely of the more ominous sections of head-lurching gravity generated by Throbbing Gristle circa Heathen Earth. Super-heavy, brain pulsing threat that just never gives up. Highly recommended.
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THE WIRE (UK)
254. APRIL 2005.
BY NICK SOUTHGATE
Grey Daturas
Dead In The Woods
Crashing Jets 004
If the melbourne sunshine puts a smile on most of its native's faces, this must be compensated for by the scowls of the Grey Daturas, an improvisational three piece intent on wiping all that is bright, clean and decent from the sunkissed land and drowning it in a muddy grave in the gape of the Pacific. "Repeat Until False" rides leaden and brutal, striating and immolating all in its path. "The Hanging Man Is No Peacock" twists in the wind, Bonnie Mercer's guitar harmonics like crows picking the corpse's eye while the sullen and cruel drums and bass of Robert McManus and Robert Mayson look on with impassive, unflinching, sunken stares. Although they cite the Stooges and Sonic Youth as influences, this is altogether darker.
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**
HEART ATTACK: (USA)
Issue 46 June 2005
Review by: Mike Ass-Kick Haley
Grey Daturas: Dead in the Woods Album
Crashing Jets 004
With a sound that is colossal, piercing and impossible to predict, Grey Daturas may very well be to Australia what Boris is to Japan or Sunn O)) to the United States. Dead in the Woods bears seventy minutes of material, and like the aforementioned artists, its futile to pigeonhole or turn down. This trio can blast out riffs like Pelican and Dead Meadow for thee or four minutes before turning into noise giants that could make Throbbing Gristle blush. I cant believe they arent touring with Fantomas or something insane like that, cause they deserve it.
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AQUARIUS RECORDS (USA)
Online review from New Arrivals List
May 2005
Album of the Week
Grey Daturas: Dead in the Woods
Crashing Jets 004
It's weird to think about the world before the Internet. Little pockets of bands in out of the way places, producing wild and wonderful music that outside of a few tape traders and cool record stores just didn't get heard. In some ways the advent of immediate worldwide communication has been a wellspring of amazing music, since now, some kid who records in his bedroom in Finland, can now be heard by anyone in the world. Anywhere. Any time. The downside is of course the proliferation of bands whose material maybe didn't need worldwide exposure, music that was just fine where it was, in the bedroom or the basement. Thankfully this particular release is a definite example of the former. Australia has produced some killer rock over the years, from AC/DC to Radio Birdman to Lubricated Goat (one of Allan and Andee's favorites) to the Dirty Three to more obscure noiserock bands like Budd or the Dumb And The Ugly or Primitive Calculators. A few lists back we reviewed an awesome disc by the band Whitehorse, whose epic sludge-y, drone-y dirge definitely hit the Sunn 0))) / Earth / Corrupted / Khanate spot. The guys in Whitehorse suggested we check out another Aussie outfit (also from Melbourne) a two guys and a gal trio called the Grey Daturas, who only a few weeks later just showed up in our store with a box full of cds, about to embark on their first US tour. And while the Daturas are indeed heavy and droney, their sound is less slow motion sludge and more blown out fuzzy psych rock. A blurry druggy mix of Hawkwind, the Dead C, Comets On Fire, Residual Echoes, Dead Meadow and Bardo Pond. The Daturas' sound is all over the map, from churning, throbbing fuzzdrug churn, with squealing feedback and choppy uneven riffing, to drifting dreamy stripped down post rock, all careening wildly between thick swaths of super overdriven psych fuzz, and drenched in crumbly distortion and all manner of wah. When they kick out the jams, it's fierce and mesmerizing, pounding and relentless, with simple propulsive percussion and spaced out swirl. Often stretching out into head nodding Krautrock jams, spacious and hypnotic. When the storms calm and the band drifts off and just sort of meanders, we're reminded of Codeine and other like minded practitioners of drowsy, druggy slow core. Still noisy, but mellow and intense, brooding and subtly aggressive.
The Grey Daturas are all instrumental which as you probably know we tend to dig, since there's nothing like a bad singer to ruin a perfectly good band, but there's always the risk of bands with no vocalists to be really really boring. But because a lot of the Daturas' tunes are improvised, and the band is willing to take all kinds of musical chances (they often switch instruments, sometimes perform as a duo with no drummer, etc...) it never gets boring, instead it becomes the perfect mix of droning free rock, kick ass instrumental post rock, buzzing druggy psych and even occasional blasts of full on metal. Mix in some cool song titles: "The Hanging Man Is No Peacock", "Force Is A Weapon Of The Weak", as well as some oddly political song titles (but more sort of Sixties politics): "For Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale", "Night Of The Barricade: Paris 1968", a gorgeous washed out black, brown and grey cardboard sleeve, and a totally kick ass live show (they performed admirably with a handful of fill-in drummers here, even teaming up with art noise outfit the Yellow Swans for one show), and you've got one of our favorite new bands / releases. AND they're recording a new record right here in SF when they get back from tour...yay!
