Mescaline was apparently the drug of choice at the heart of Dark Shadows, Cold Sun’s only-ever album. Recorded in 1970, the audio-orientated mind-altering cacti extract, was considered by the band as the perfect foil to access their fully realised world. A feast of tripping surrealist lyrics, combined with a fantastic blend of expansive rock, and confirms the whole album on the top-tier of psychedelic rock.
The album culminates in the stunning 11 minutes of Ra-Ma, a slowly gathering, disorienting groove that grows into a fully blown stream-of-consciousness, freak sermon. As the song twists and turns, it’s clear the band are drawing from a bottomless pit of ideas. From the first time I ever heard the song years ago, to this bright new reissue ‘“Three sultans with a hookah, just flew by on a carpet, heading west….” some 6 minutes in, has always felt like some statement of fact, and a shared hallucination everyone could see. Psychedelic music that projects out your third eye, and into reality.
Cold Sun, remain one of the genuine anomalies in the twisted story of Texan psychedelic music. Recorded at a time that would have effortlessly filled a void next to the recently evaporated 13th Floor Elevators trajectory. In fact, partially grew out of The Spades, an early iteration of that very band. Cold Sun also shared the same home town of Austin. But for whatever reason the album sat unloved for two decades before finally being released in the grey reality of 1990. The band comprises of Billy Bill Miller (autoharp, guitar, harmonica, vocals), Mike Waugh (bass, vocals), Tom McGarrigle (guitar, bass, vocals) and Hugh Patton (drums, glass chimes). However, the 44 minutes of Cold Shadows continually feels so much more than the sum of its parts, a singular vision of hugely potent brain bubbling rock.
The album opens with the lysergic magnifying glass of South Texas. The world imagined through the enlarged pupils of a gecko, transporting you to ‘the nose of the world’. If things had been different, the punchy 3 minutes of Twisted Flower could have easily been the mind melted single, another journey from normality morphing into symbols of far greater consequence. It’s almost impossible to keep track what’s going on in the near 9 minutes of Here In A Year, a mangled warning about the future, consumerism, and the growing presence and brain rot of television.
For Ever is insistent and sparkling with driving rhythms but as always, full of twists and trapdoors that makes everything feel like 3 or 4 tracks weirdly stitched together. Perhaps eventually, See What You Cause strays the closest to the Elevators as it skips through a fuzzed country groove. Somehow despite still being super baked, it’s also the most earth-based track here.
Fall and the Ra-Ma stretch out over the final 18 minutes of this album and despite the stunning build up, this really captures Cold Sun majestically fire balling. Fall is the world pulling itself to pieces, the lofty judgements, and collapses, giving way to the seeming magic carpet ridden enlightenment of Ra-Ma.
No matter what state you chose to let this music wash over you, Cold Shadows never fails to hit hard. A ceremony, a mescaline-based fever, and intensely detailed nonsense, but the truth, despite it never being less than total bewildering, it never allows you to let it become background.
Cold Sun reeks of another place and time, of creative individuals working together to build a vision of the world. Dark Shadows remains a weighty, powerful statement – a gathering of just seven unwieldy but perfectly formed songs, an atom sized discography cut adrift from its natural place in history.
However, every element somehow strikes the right balance. Pared back skewed psych rock dripping with hallucinatory lyrics, that capture an entire band riding a standing wave of mind melting inspiration. Whatever year, decade or century you happen to be tuning in from, it’s always going to be immaculate…
Dark Shadows is re-issued by Guerssen Records, and its availble digitally, and on vinyl and limited edition green vinyl here
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