Review Summary: By the end of the 90’s “Ode to the riff”, pardon me, “Ode to Io”, was the best definition of stoner-rock you could get.
“1990 was an era of perfect metal. It was very staccato. Typing, Heavy Metal typing. They were not that at all. They were like getting the typewriter and stepping on it with your boot in slow motion.” (Goss, 2014)
For many people, this was just Chris Goss talking about the band Kyuss he produced, in the documentary Sonic Highways (2014). But for others this also defines an alternative approach to the heavy music in the 90’s. Slowing down highly distorted guitar lines in the form of monolithic riffs was not a new thing though. Doom metal bands were doing that in an extreme way using dark themes for respect to the early Black Sabbath sound. But somehow some bands figured out that this slowness and fuzzy distortion with a lot of reverb were allowing the music to fill in huge empty spaces as a desert! This combining with the low notes would affect the brain fluidly and continuously. A stoned state of mind they say…
The whole Californian desert-rock movement was intensely built on this concept. Driven by punk-rock vibes, bands as Kyuss turned doomy monolithic riffs into a celebration for joy, nature, and freedom. Such sense of freedom and emptiness - and sure the use of psychotropic substances as well - kind of shorten the distance between the sand on our feet and the sky. So, not only the heaviest overseas desert-rock predecessors tried to copy this kind of slow-punk sound, as they used the same desert and universe themes, helping to create an homogenous international style eventually called stoner-rock.
Despite that homogeneity desert-rock and stoner-rock have gotten many shapes since MeteorCity Records decided to establish this new sonority in a form of a compilation called Welcome to MeteorCity (1998). Far from “the desert”, many bands in the cold and greeny north-Europe for instance, explored other musical elements as expected.
In Sweden however, where the proliferation of projects of this kind got particularly noticed at the time, a band called Lowrider created a classic album by respecting the source too much. Rejecting almost any kind of experimentalism, deep psychedelism or long instrumental progressions, Ode to Io is desert-rock in its purest and heaviest form. So neutral and raw that for many people it is more stoner-rock than Monster Magnet or Fu Manchu. These bands being pioneers of the genre, were in many ways still attached to older influences.
What makes this album musically very enjoyable besides that simplicity is the refined sense of groove. The warm guitar tone might be able to melt all the ice covering Stockholm in a tough January. But the groove Ola Hellqvist and company play the fatty and crunchy riffs with is so intense; we just feel like wanting to speed up a truck against a dusty mountain - or 'stepping a typewriter with our boot'. It is what I feel every time the second riff of “Flat Earth” blasts off. It is an interpretation of “Hole in the Sky” (Black Sabbath song, from Sabotage, 1975) or the times Tony Iommi composed with a rare exhilaration. But even when Lowrider slow down even more, the high quality riffage keeps getting stuck in our heads. Particularly “Caravan”, “Dust Settlin’” and “Saguaro” have some of the most memorable riffs the genre has ever created.
But Lowrider’s only album is not solely a bunch of groovy riffs. A clean production that brightened the bass and the loud drums (check "Anchor") makes Ode to Io still sounding fresh today. The vocals are remarkable as well. Ola but mostly Peder Bergstrand (who sings in almost every song), not having a particularly powerful voice created simple but imponent vocal melodies with a spacey touch. It sounds like John Garcia wearing a space helmet. “Convey V”, “Dust Settlin’” and “Texas” refrains sound like swallowing our brains. And lyrics are desert-rock at its best. Just look at the songs titles...
Almost the whole album is indeed explosive, fuzzy and ’straight to the point’. Even the solos are as fluid as short (wah-wah always there...). But there is also time to breathe. The acoustic break called “Sun Devil” makes us rest our ears, but it is the outstanding “Texas Pt. I & II” that deserves particular attention. Its proggy structure, reminding the epic "Spaceship Landing" (Kyuss song, from And the Circus Leaves Town, 1995), allowed some room for a more psychedelic approach. The guitar solo is just beautiful. But it is a rare moment in the album. Which is quite surprising given what the band promised in the split EP released with Nebula in 1999 (“Shivaree” and “Upon the Dune” are the best examples).
All in all, by the end of the 90’s Ode to Io was the best definition of stoner-rock you could get. We can argue that at the time Lowrider were not the only ones presenting the genre in a very raw and straight approach. Many John Garcia post-Kyuss projects (Slo Burn, Unida, Hermano) did it, as their Swedish counterparts (Dozer, Truckfighters, Spiritual Beggars). But none of them created such a potential classic as Ode to Io, where almost every song is a 'hit' in its own right. More than a decade after, stoner-rock became a mere artistic movement very wide in its influences: either too experimental, too ’70’s alike’ or too doom. Therefore MeteorCity’s first generation of bands slowly became more and more original and unreplicable. Fortunately, and following the Kyuss reunion in 2010, desert-rock followers probably driven by nostalgia, are trying to bring many of those bands to light again. Lowrider reunited in 2013 for some concerts and to produce a new album. And in 2017, a deluxe edition of Ode to Io was released, satisfying many who could never get a physical copy of this quintessential album.
