Pre-order of This Place Is Haunted. You get 2 tracks now (streaming via the free Bandcamp app and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the complete album the moment it’s released.
Purchasable with gift card
releases May 17, 2024
$7USD or more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Comes in digipak packaging.
Includes digital pre-order of This Place Is Haunted.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
digital album releases May 17, 2024
item ships out on or around May 13, 2024
$10.99USDor more
Cassette + Digital Album
Limited edition of 100 copies. Comes with download code.
Includes digital pre-order of This Place Is Haunted.
You get 2 tracks now
(streaming via the free Bandcamp app
and also available as a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more), plus the
complete album the moment it’s released.
One of the coolest quotes that I've come across on High Noon Kahuna's debut album Killing Spree came from Philly deathsludge entity / underground commentator Rot Coven, who described the music on "Spree" as an "utterly baffling blend of 70’s proto-metal, Black Flag / Bl’ast-ish hardcore punk, kaleidoscopic psychedelia, and what sounds like some kind of heavily amplified surf music (which kept making me think of the weird “surfy” parts of Agent Orange for whatever that’s worth to anyone).... like some acid-damaged mid-80’s Arizona band that would have played shows with JFA, Mighty Sphincter, and the Sun City Girls."
Man, I could not have put it better myself. That comment was probably the most astute assessment of the band's 2023 disc I've read. The band and that album were (and are) most definitely weird, totally ignoring any semblance of genre guardrails for an explosive riot of melody and heaviness, chaos and musical proficiency, and most importantly, hammering riffage and serious earworm material. High Noon Kahuna traverse those hinterlands between noise rock, hardcore punk, sludgy metallic crunch, surf guitar flourishes and Morricone-esque atmosphere, and wild-eyed, spaced-out psychedelic adventure, where it all bleeds and blurs together into something that is just as unique as their name demands. It's the result of a shared background in the DMV underground that goes back decades; between guitarist Tim Otis (Admiral Browning), drummer Brian Goad (Internal Void / The Larrys / Nagato), and bassist / singer Paul Cogle (Black Blizzard / Vox Populi / Nagato / Slagstorm), each member of the trio has left enduring fingerprints on much of what has been going on in the outer fringes of the DC suburbs for nearly forty years.
That uniqueness takes on a darker cast with their sophomore album This Place Is Haunted, their second release with Crucial Blast. Recorded with Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations, Haunted's mix of burly, noisy rock and mysterious texture work in tandem to evoke the ectoplasmic shadows of the title. Visions of spirit boards and swirling motes of dust above a long-past séance. Ecteneic forces and shaking tables. A door opens. And something looms over High Noon Kahuna's peculiar, punchy songwriting and wigged-out soundscapery. The twelve songs on Haunted wind through a phantasmal labyrinth of odd noise, roaring anthemic hooks, stretched-out stratospheric psych, eerie layered melody, and moments of dark, doom-laden heaviness. Like their first album, it's a long strange trip through a sun-bleached delirium, but this nearly hour-long epic overturns stranger stones and peers into darker corners.
Mangled distortion and luminous, moody Hammond organ hover over the mesmeric backbeat of "Atomic Sunset", the point of entry for Haunted's other-worldliness. Heavy space-rock electronics swoop over ominous groove laced with desert-baked melody and Otis's strained, soulful howl. "Lamborghini" erupts from that heat-haze with a cruising instrumental that shifts into higher gear, only to give way to the sludgy pop mastery of "Prehistoric Love Letter" that unloads raucous, distortion soaked hooks and keening multi-part harmonies backed by the thunderous rhythm section. It’s quite possibly the catchiest thing I've ever heard from High Noon Kahuna, and channels my most beloved aspects of noisy, catchy, guitar-heavy rock from the early 1990s into a single gleaming chunk of haunting perfection. Which makes the majestic doom-laden crush of songs like "Midnight Moon " and "Good Night God Bless" all the heavier, their dark lumbering riffs strafed with wah-soaked leads and stomping tempos, washes of frantic noise and lysergic effects all descending into sinister psychedelic pandemonium, often surrounded by creepy creaking cacophony that coalesces into something akin to poltergeist activity.
This Place Is Haunted proceeds to push deeper into this strange haze, songs like "The Devil's Lettuce" laying out that Morricone-meets-Ventures guitar vibrato amid sprawls of narcotized trance-rock, alternating these deeply mesmeric instrumental explorations with harder, bittersweet noise-rock / gritty 'gazey numbers like "Brand New Day" and the ferocious "Sidewalk Assassin". And again, it's also some of their heaviest stuff yet: the crunching might of “Mystical Shit" sees Kahuna erupt into punishing locomotive power, an unstoppable central riff driving the band through the shadow-infested badlands, part Teutonic hyperdrive, part hypno-metal atavism. Throughout it all, Cogle and Goad's pummeling bass guitar and drumming lock together as a Gordian knot, creating a continuous hypnotizing backdrop of endless groove; through this, Otis unleashes a storm of spaced-out effects, meandering mournful melody, massive crushing riffs, and that inimitable lead guitar style that effortlessly blends the spikiness of early hardcore punk with his brand of "Spaghetti surf" that melts reverb and tremolo together into lush waves of sound. You can particularly hear that on the sensuous swaggering "Tumbleweed Nightmare", almost apocalyptic as its grim visions move through tremolo n’ reverb-soaked sun-bleached waste and into the slow-burn, looming instrumental intensity of "Flaming Dagger" that pushes onward into twilight and beyond. But the finality of "Et Ita Factum Est" leads the listener straight into midnight ritual, drawing together all of the huge 'gazy crush, tendrils of spectral and translucent guitar, bursts of stomping , droning riffage and bone-rattling rhythmic thud, summoning a vast, psilocybin-soaked blast of ghostly power-sludge that turns into a bizarre post-punk nightmare, dancing in tandem with towering flames, vague spindly figures obscured by the blackness, and weird witchy voices (courtesy of drummer Goad) wavering in the shadows, leaving everything, including you, touched by the numinous in the end.
Harder, darker, but absolutely brimming with infectious melody, High Noon Kahuna's This Place Is Haunted executes a killer mixture of classic noise rock, heavy shoegaze, psychedelic crunch, and experimental creep. The band is working on a whole new level here. This rumbling riff-beast brilliantly evokes everything from Amphetamine Reptile-era abrasion, soaring Hawkwindian space rock, and the searching instrumentals of Earthless, to the spookier fringes where both krautrock and post-punk blur together, specters of classic doom, and the scintillating guitar sounds of vintage surf and soundtrack music, even dipping into the concussive groove of bands like Kyuss and Queens Of The Stone Age at times. With This Place Is Haunted, High Noon Kahuna have firmly cemented themselves as one of the most unique bands to ever emerge from the DC/MD area, weirder, heavier, and catchier than ever before.
credits
releases May 17, 2024
Tim Otis: guitar / vocals
Brian Goad: drums / vocals
Paul Cogle: bass / vocals
Recorded with Kevin Bernsten at Developing Nations
Crucial Blast is an independent underground label and online shop specializing in cutting edge, experimental heavy music and
related cultural artifacts, with a particular focus on blackened avant-metal, nihilistic noise/industrial, dark ambiance, infernal psychedelia, and hardcore improv/free-jazz....more
Weedian presents a 56-track chronicle of Mexico's stoner metal and heavy psych scenes, from ’90s forefathers to contemporary wrecking crews. Bandcamp New & Notable Sep 21, 2022
Combining jazz-infused prog, ‘70s heavy metal and stoner doom, thrash metal, and grunge, the Puerto Rican legion’s debut is nothing short of a behemoth. Bandcamp Album of the Day Nov 7, 2018
Scalding lo-fi metal from RodtGod that puts a premium on immediacy and brutality, with terrifically bracing results. Bandcamp New & Notable Feb 12, 2022
