EARTHWORKS ~ EARTHWORKS .... review

Guitar and bass tones drenched in enough distortion and fuzz to drown a small village driven by sedate yet unbelievably busy drumming is what is on offer today and the band doing the offering go by the name Earthworks. Earthworks, Mercedes Macomber (vocals); Reilly Tennesen (guitar/sitar): David Bell (bass) and Garrison Kadau (drums, percussion), first came onto Desert Psychlist's radar via their Bandcamp released demo "Volume 1", and what caught our attention on that demo was the contrast between Macomber's clean clear vocal tones and the absolute onslaught of distorted heaviness Tennesen, Bell and Kadau laid down beneath those tones. Demo's are notoriously underproduced affairs so its nice to see that three of those songs reappear primped and polished, though still retaining their essential rawness, on this their self-titled debut sitting beside three new songs that really show another side of this bands sound.

Opening track "Bongwitch" starts with sampled narration followed by some "Sweet Leaf" like coughing then launches into a mid-tempo groove soaked in delicious dank distortion and fuzz. The songs overall vibe is unashamedly proto-doomic and is given wings by Macomber's delightfully clean and smooth vocal, her voice, pitched somewhere between soaring and ethereal, adding just the right levels of gravitas to the songs mystical lyrical content. The superbly titled "Commence The Riff" follows and finds Macomber lifting her vocal into a higher register to tell us a "weedian" flavoured tale of  "ritual orgies and incantations" backed by an achingly sedate bass and guitar refrain pushed by industrious thundering drumming, the highlight here though has to be Tennesen's wah pedal fuelled guitar solo which is far more feel based than it is technical. "Hillbilly Witchcraft" is up next, the song kicks off with Tennesen knocking out a lone and bluesy guitar motif that then briefly morphs into a heavy blues tinted doom groove when Ball's low and gnarly bass and Kadau's rock steady drums join the party. Macomber delivers over this groove a superb vocal melody, roughing up her tones with elements of grittiness and growl, if you thought the version of this song gracing their demo was something special, well this version will blow your mind! The first of the bands  new material arrives in the shape of "Cosmic Spiral", here we find Earthworks dipping their toes into more lysergic waters with Macomber's heavily filtered vocal melody framed by passages of grizzled low slow heaviness and lapses into atmospheric haziness offset with a myriad of differing textures and colours from Tennesen's guitar. A Bell bass motif introduces "Sharptooth" which is then joined by Tennesen on sitar and Kadau on hand percussion over which Macomber delivers a soaring eastern flavoured vocal. The song then shifts up a gear with Tennesen reverting back to his guitar and Kadau moving over to his full kit to deliver a groove that although doomic retains its middle-eastern feel, well that is until the songs final third when the hammer goes down and the musicians launch into something very close to being a heavy psych/rock freakout, the songs final moments marked by Tennesen once again picking up his sitar to take things to the close. Finally we arrive at "The Woodsman", its opening salvo of thrumming noise slowly evolving into a bona-fide riff backed by sparse but effective drumming before momentarily slowing down again to allow Macomber space to deliver an uncharacteristically low key and slightly deadpan vocal that tells a tale of a man at one with nature over a backdrop of proto-metallic doom awash with distortion and fuzz. At around the halfway mark the band take a detour from all the bluster and heaviness and shift into a hazy cosmic passage taken to an altogether other level by liquid like lead work and fusion like rhythmic patterns, the band gradually moving back towards the heaviness of the opening half of the song but cleverly managing to restrain themselves from going too far in that direction.  

Earthworks debut "Earthworks" is not something you could readily describe as an occult rock album but nor could it be said that it is an album that sits strictly in the doom canon.. If anything Earthworks music exists in a place somewhere between the two, not quite as ethereal as one and not as visceral as the other, a place where they can be free to be whatever they want to be at any given time and make the music they want to make without the weight of a label or tag dragging them down. 

Check 'em out .... 

 

© 2025 Frazer Jones