ninehertz

With a name like Altar of the Fuzz you feel somewhat safe making book cover judgements on what you are about to hear (an impression exacerbated by its 4/20 release date), and that for lovers of doom like us, we’re likely to enjoy ourselves in the process.

A three-piece from Ottawa, Altar of the Fuzz of course come to meet those expectations, but also expand upon them a little beyond where you might have first imagined; Drifter Lost Within Haze an offering of four tracks – one per word of the title.

Drifter sets the scene, a great pace with a liberal coating of fuzz that ensures that within the instrumental nature of the band, vocals are not missed. It mixes between a chilled tone and an urgency of the stoner rock spectrum. It is very easy to warm to. Lost then changes tack, almost towards post-rock atmospherics – the change up is welcome, but I’m unsure of where it is heading, perhaps appropriate for the title.

There are further dimensions explored on Within, a long, astral voyage of psychedelic noodling in The Cosmic Dead manner, before Haze closes out. This turns back to doom, ethereal with it – a misty wandering apparition of doom and heavy psych, I drift in and out but this time in the spirit of what the band are presumably aiming to achieve, lost in the travels around the cosmos.

My expectations of the album changed somewhat over the course of the four tracks, from a base and obvious doom assumption to something that intermingled between the sister genres of stoner and psych, ending up much more cosmically aligned than I’d imagined when I began. It is all the better for it.