Halcyon Magazine

BY SASHA LEE

Release Date: Feb 17, 2009

Brooklyn’s Weird Owl recently signed to Tee Pee records and are readying to release their debut album, “Ever The Silver Cord Be Loosed.” Their sound pays homage to Neil Young’s earlier electrified work with Crazy Horse, before a man needed a maid or despaired the needle and the damage done. In particular, parts recall to mind Neil Young’s album “On The Beach,”– it wouldn’t surprise me if these guys were imbibing the notorious “Honey Slides” (sauteed pot in honey cooked on the stove) that were heavily consumed during that album- and made slide guitarist Rusty Kershaw think he was a python hissing on the floor around  Neil Young’s legs. Actually, that being said,  Weird Owl sort of sounds exactly like Rusty Kershaw dropping his slide guitar and instead slithering around like a drugged out riff hovering around Neil’s legs. Their slippy, trippy hints at punishing riffs mixed with certain hallucinatory softness (like they’re too fucked up to punch you in the gut the way Sabbath would) push them more in the direction of Hawkwind. Like 13th Floor Elevators sinister cover of “Its All Over Now Baby Blue,” slowing the tempo to a frightening mushroom-induced halt, Weird Owl sounds as if they’re stretching some sort of southern rock folk and resituating it within a Dead Meadow.

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The East Wind Still Blows Red

TEXT BY: SEAN FORD

I could dream up a million crazy stories to tell you about Chinese Democracy, the nearly posthumous masterwork from the long fallen Guns and Roses. I could tell you that Axel Rose enlisted a traditional Japanese shamisen player from the peaks of Mt. Fujiama in order to give the album more cultural depth.  I could tell you the lyrics were originally written in Aramaic, translated into English, and then meticulously reworked into iambic pentameter.  I could say that track seven was actually just a Jamiroquai cover, and the legal battle to secure the publishing rights took Geffen records underwater. I could basically say whatever the fuck I wanted about this record because no matter how tolerant your sensibilities, there is no way in hell you made it all the way through this wretched gauntlet of ass garbage.

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TEXT BY: COLIN GRAHAM

"Scales" album cover

Mythical Beast is kind of an interesting name for a band. Funny, you know, because instead of naming their band “Leviathan,” or “Gryphon,” or “Yeti” or some other proud and terrible great beast, they named themselves after every instance of someone ever using one of those ideas, ever…(maybe) by naming themselves as the category. The entire mathematical set of every mythical beast ever. That’s a lot of cool stuff to be named after.
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