Album Review: Frying on This Rock by White Hills

Never ones to slow down for too long, psychedelic space rockers White Hills deliver another blast of swirling, fuzzed-out sonic meditations on Frying On This Rock. Though it was recorded outside of the noise-friendly confines of Oneida's Ocropolis studios, the album's more compact and repetitive sound finds the band evoking the more Krautrock-inspired moments from "Sheets of Easter," with White Hills focusing more on building songs in a more careful, precise manner. This kind of tight, purposeful jamming is what keeps songs like "Robot Stomp" and "I Write a Thousand Letters (Pulp on Bone)" engrossing even as they push past the ten-minute mark.

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Well, this is a funny way of reeling it in. White Hills, those hyperprolific purveyors of jaw-clenching, brain-warping psychedelia, aren't ones to shy away from the sprawl; why solo for three minutes, main man Dave W. seems to always be saying, when a dozen minutes will do? On the other hand, "songs" have rarely felt like much more than jumping-off points for the band's interstellar overdrive.

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White Hills is one of the more formidable contemporary heirs to the Hawkwind space rock throne, an electrifying live band, and a damned prolific bunch. Here's another full-length, right on the heels of last year's Live at Roadburn and the ferocious H-p1..

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For a group that sound like they’re no strangers to the bong, White Hills certainly are prolific. Frying On This Rock comes less than a year after their triumphant H-p1. Critically lauded and prominent in numerous end of year lists, H-p1 was 70-plus minutes of immersive, trance-inducing space rock interrupted by quieter passages of darkly ambient moon squelch which some of us are still trying to fully digest.

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Such is the ferocious work ethic of White Hills that their idea of relaxation is considering whether Death By Audio's Total Sonic Annihilation pedal is a better bet than the Deucetone RAT distortion box, by sticking their heads into a PA system while setting their amps at world destruction levels. Probably. See, given the New York space cadets' schedule over last year or so – the release of the wormhole inducing H-P1, relentless touring and finding time to put out a live album in the shape of the limited edition Live At Roadburn 2011 and a tour CD-R entitled Oddity II: Night Scene On Mill Mountain, as well as other sundry low-key releases – taking time off is as alien a concept to White Hills as is turning the volume down.

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