Dos

Magnet - "[I]t's on graceful gringo dance 'Above The Big Wide' that Stahl best soliloquizes his weird West Coast scenes and makes emotional poetry that's as uplifting as the music is roomy and open."

With a lineage that includes such doom-filled heavy hitters as Scream, Wool, Goatsnake, and the Desert Sessions, the uplifting, mellow collection of summer psych pop on Dandy Brown's second Orquesta del Desierto outing is somewhat unexpected. There does seem to be a commonality in texture and production between Dos and albums from quintessential Palm Desert bands like Kyuss and Queens of the Stone Age. And, even if they don't fall under the rubric of heavy stoner rock, Brown's outfit certainly sounds pretty baked. But OdD combines '60s psychedelia, Creedence, the Meat Puppets, and Latin-tinged acoustic pop in their vision of sun-drenched desert rock. Listeners are unlikely to find a song as propulsive and overpoweringly happy as the decidedly California-circa-1968, Wall of Sound number "Summer" -- that is unless it's on a Jayhawks record. "Rope" sounds like "Black Hole Sun"-era Soundgarden had they grown up happy Deadheads. And "Someday" is a sprawling psychedelic number that could easily fit onto the Meat Puppets' Up on the Sun. Dos turns out to be a perfect and idiosyncratic record that beautifully captures a facet of Southern California and defines a new type of music in the process. The more you listen to it, the more the Palm Desert connection makes sense. Dos is like the acoustic numbers on Led Zeppelin III -- hardly heavy, but still in the same spirit -- making Orquesta del Desierto the Zeppelin III of the land of scorched earth and sand. ~ Charles Spano|