Avondale Airforce

By DAVID MALACHOWSKI
Review

ARTIST: Avondale Airforce

ALBUM: Avondale Airforce



Featuring local lights Peter Aaron (Chrome Cranks) and Stanton Warren (Venture Lift), Avondale Airforce is a guitar-centric, psychedelic duo from Woodstock who couldn’t care less about convention. The two come from the vibe versus chops school. They go freeform for the most part, eschewing the usual verse, chorus concept for something a little more linear, improvising with less structure, lots of masking and tons of texture.

Here, “Lift Off” is a fitting start with its launching pad sounds. It falls into the explosive raw two chord work out of “Circle Line.” “This Isn’t Real” is tremolo- drenched, “Come To Terms” is acoustic guitar driven. The whirling dervish of “Sputnik Searchlight” is a multi-layered musical helicopter that goes around and around through the dense air, with crying guitars above pulsing power chords that cycle endlessly. The lengthy “Stare At the Sun” recalls spacey early Pink Floyd circa “Saucer Full Of Secrets,” with piercing slide guitar lines. “Five Seconds” borrows the riff from Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful” and turns it into a trance inducing-trip. “This Isn’t Real” asks “where is the love?”

Repetitive yet improvisional, equal parts ethereal and weighty, this Airforce flies high, with music for the mind more than the body. The two use the guitar more as a paint brush than a musical instrument, a different means to an end, with intriguing music still the result. - Kingston Freeman

It’s called Tower of Spacious Karma, but instead of spires to heaven, think more horizontally: expansive fields of sonic love, and 14 flavors, to boot. Gently head-nodding psychedelia is the unifying conceit on Venture Lift’s second album, but the focus is squarely on diversity. Hudson resident Stanton Warren seems dedicated not to meat-and-mushrooms psych-rock so much as the hazy glaze that seems to settle over such sounds. The music here isn’t lightweight, just presented with a light touch.

The opening track, “Bukowski on the Brain,” instead of evoking some alcoholic mania, draws on the holiest of rock ’n’ roll founts, the Velvet Underground’s repetitive guitar strum (perhaps by way of the Brian Jonestown Massacre), to conjure a long day of sun-dappled bliss. But Warren follows with a series of left turns that reflect a casually restless mind, at least when it comes to “head” music: “Distance” employs a synthetic beat underneath a lattice of tremolo-ed guitar lines, while “Do You Hear It?” is desert dry and about as illusory. If Warren occasionally strays a bit—the title track sounds like something of an exercise in yoga soundtracking—he more than redeems himself with the layered, shadowy tension of the 10-minute-plus “It’s Not Safe” (with the record’s most effective vocal work, by guest Ingrid Sertso) and the soft chug of “Helios,” which resembles Moon Duo on a helium bender. www.venturelift.com. - Chronogram