Carlton Melton - Country Ways - CD

On Country Ways, Carlton Melton have managed to home in on something truly excellent….the mixing and production here is perfect. They have also achieved a restraint that was conspicuously lacking before, in the process establishing themselves as a unique new voice in psychedelic America….This is the ultimate Carlton Melton statement. Here, they are at their most unapologetically one-dimensional, with no riffs or even chord changes in sight, but just 20 minutes of blunt space rock drone. The track establishes guitarists Rich Millman and Andy Duvall as the key engineers of this ominously heavy sound, and indeed the interplay between them (one takes on layering duties, the other improvised noodling) is both tighter and more natural sounding than before.

Third track 'Harrington Fair' does persist with the hazy, distorted layering that all their compositions seem to start from, but is quickly transformed into something more arresting, and the best track on the record, by a meandering blues-based five-minute guitar solo that is a nigh-on perfect encapsulation of exactly the sort of thing Jerry Garcia was exploring on the Grateful Dead's Anthem Of The Sun, albeit with somewhat more colour and energy than the Carlton Melton way of doing things.

Country Ways only has four 'jams', but the album is padded out by three bonus tracks. 'The One That Got Away (Extended Version)' revisits a piece the band had previously released as a 7”, while 'March Of The Cicadas' features a riff suspiciously similar to 'When You're In'. That's fine though – as a seven-track release this is 74 minutes of glorious, multi-textured mud-rock, and is the finest thing Carlton Melton have yet put their name to.

 

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