Light Up And Live

Product Description ------------------- Psychedelic rockers HARSH TOKE explore sound and space through music. On the San Diego Rock band's debut album Light Up and Live, loud, heavy guitars, swimming bass lines and smashing drums warp to full throttle, working together to launch the group's "Haze Maze" of unapologetic psychedelic-blues into interstellar overdrive. Recorded by Brian Ellis (also of the prog-rock band ASTRA) and mastered by Carl Saff (Earthless, OFF!, Unsane), HARSH TOKE's Light Up and Live will be released on November 19 via Tee Pee. Led by ripping pro skater and rip-roaring guitarist Justin "Figgy" Figueroa, HARSH TOKE are equal parts atmospheric and anarchic, merging raging, blind fury musicianship with unprecedented white-knuckle volume abuse. Tense and surreal, HARSH TOKES' songs slowly build from hallucinatory haze into grand overtures of noise and feedback; a cosmic buffet of pounding, pummeling and punishing planes of sound. Heavy. Cosmic. Kinetic. HARSH TOKE lay down sizzling grooves with every needle on the soundboard pinned to the red. If Blue Cheer could be called "Louder than God" in 1968, forty five years later, HARSH TOKE can easily be pegged as "Louder than Satan." Run for your lives - into the din. Review ------ ''Harsh Toke's space-rock will take your mind on a cosmic journey through the rings of Saturn and back again. They've transcended the plateau of time and space and their galactic forehers from the '70s underground would be very proud to call them their own. Inhale deep and take it down you sissy.'' -- --Front With a name like Harsh Toke, you might know what you're in for. Heavy, relentless blues-metal guitar in constant jam mode with no off switch? Pounding drums and fuzzy, incense smoke-reeking basslines? Swimming psychedelia of the most impaired variety? Harsh Toke deliver all of the above on their self-titled debut full-length album, with just four tracks stretching into some cosmic exploration over the album's 40-odd minute running time. Like a hazy dream, the band segue from the Sabbath-worshiping album-opener ''Rest in Prince'' directly into a breakdown of random percussion and watery flutes on the beginning of the epic suite ''Weight of the Sun,'' which transitions from its gentle Popol Vuh-reminiscent beginnings into a loopy, narcotic blur of delayed guitars and screaming organ nightmares. Clearly from the same school of jamming and mind expansion that gave us great albums like 's ''Dopesmoker,'' but dialing back the heavy doom and dread that characterized that record, Harsh Toke gets into stoner jams as unhinged, ecstatic, and wandering as some of the greats. There's a slight cartoonishness that comes with the revivalism of rock's early days, but despite weed-centric titles like ''Light Up and Live,'' Harsh Toke mostly keep the focus on their restless, druggy rhythms and the interplay between guitarist Justin Figueroa's endless edge-of-the-world soloing and vocalist/organist Gabe Messer's psychedelic keyboard washes. The band even get into more outlandish territory on the ten-minute album-closer ''Plug Into the Moon,'' with the addition of a saxophone player as wild and unglued as the rest of the band in his epic jamming. The song recalls the same wanton, desperate energy of ''L.A. Blues,'' the sax/noise closer to the Stooges ''Fun House,'' and it constructs similar walls of unhinged noise, menace, and transcendence with its barrage of sound. --All Music Guide, November, 2013

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