There's always been a strong case to be made for the power trio, a three-man rock unit capable of delivering straightforward, no-frills rock that gets to the point without a lot of pomp and circumstance. And while this setup has been the gold standard for decades, a new challenger to the throne of simplicity has appeared: the duo. Doing it bigger, heavier, and gnarlier sans bass player,
Indian Handcrafts join the ranks of bands like
Tweak Bird and
Big Business, doing more with less and making other bands seem flimsy in the process. On
Civil Disobedience for Losers, the pair offers up a collection of titanic, riff-driven psychedelic sludge, taking listeners on a voyage through the heaviest and druggiest reaches of a cosmic metal swamp. Owing almost as much to
Hawkwind as they do
the Melvins,
Indian Handcrafts inject plenty of stoner rock into their two-man sludge, occasionally bringing layers of delay-heavy guitar to give the album a sense of atmosphere that some of their contemporaries tend to forget about. Like the hobbyist who builds a replica of the White House out of matchsticks, the pair uses a minimal toolset to build something suitably impressive, creating an album that's as likely to expand your mind as it is blow out your eardrums. Add the production of Toshi Kasai to the mix, and
Civil Disobedience for Losers is easily one of the best pieces of
Melvins-worship to come out in a while. ~ Gregory Heaney