Karma To Burn – Slight Reprise 2012
NOW!…
If, like West Virginia stoner rockers Karma To Burn, you’ve got huge guitar riffs and gargantuan grooves on tap, why bow to convention and have a ‘whining, posing douche-bag at a microphone’ spoiling all your fun? That’s exactly what Karma To Burn thought back in 1996 when they were offered a deal with Roadrunner Records. Here were three guys having a ball, knocking out some quite superb uncompromising, bulldozing stoner grooves as an instrumental power trio free of the complications a singer brings to the table. The only problem was that Roadrunner were not having any of it. The deal, and the money, was on the table on the condition they get themselves a singer. The lure of the filthy lucre was too much to resist, so singer Jay Jarosz was recruited and vocals were added to what became their first album, ‘Karma To Burn’. Things didn’t exactly work out though, so Jarosz was ejected, the band lost the deal and returned to their original incarnation as an instrumental trio.
‘Karma To Burn: Slight Reprise’, is that first album seeing the light of day for the very first time in its entirety, exactly how the band originally intended it to be heard – in all its raw instrumental glory, save for one track, ‘Two Times’, featuring the vocals of Kyuss legend John Garcia – a track Roadrunner also refused to release at the time. With the absence of vocals and lyrics, the song titles have reverted to mere numbers; something the band became renowned for on subsequent albums. I’m not going to go through each number here, otherwise it’ll look like I’m ordering a Chinese takeaway, but suffice it to say all the aforementioned huge, bulldozing guitar riffs and gargantuan grooves are here in all their original splendour. In fact, this album churns out irresistible riffs on a conveyor belt, all melded together with some superb and very grooving rhythm work from start to finish. At times, it’s gutwretchingly powerful, but always finds time to take a step back and breathe along the way.
If you’re a fan of stoner rock or desert rock, instrumental or not, you really should be checking this out, even if you are one of the few that bought the original album 15 years ago – you’ll see it in a whole new light, the light the band really wanted you to see it in in the first place. A word of warning to hard core K2B fans though – although this is the entire album as it was meant to be, a handful of these tracks have already been released on the bonus disc of 2010’s excellent ‘Appalachian Incantation’ album, so there may be a few moments on here you’re already familiar with.
Karma To Burn – Slight Reprise 2012