Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

It's lucky the first song's got a catchy enough chorus cause by about the sixteenth time around I'd be getting plenty bored with it. It's called "People Fall Down" and it's a yammering, stammering, drunken stupor of an opening track that does nothing to suggest edge of your seat excitement, but rather, flat on your ass immobility after the tenth hour toke. 

"Message To Shareholders" is a mid-paced follower with a murky voice drowned in heavy echo and Devil's music. Just don't wonder what that message might be until we've developed the means for backward play, then watch the crowd form. "People Fall Down," "Wizard Of The Upper Snake River," "Keep On Truckin…" okay, I'm not blind to the purple haze forming over my personal sphere but "Message To Shareholders?" As if the name weren't indicative enough, Caustic Resin is what you might consider "Stoner Rock…" if you were over eighty and resting comfortably in your rocker of choice; To the rest of the world, they're a drearily paced wall of psychedelia and "Symptom"-era Sab… acid drenched, denim music with an Ozzy drown-alike buried in dread, dead but dreaming, and Tom Petty's sophomoric summer of '72 basement break. 

Not without their acclaim, Caustic Resin boasts guys like Brett Netson and Mike Johnson, both of whom have logged mileage in bands like Built To Spill, Dinosaur Jr. and QOTSA. There are moments of debilitating delight underlying the billow like on "Wizard Of The Upper Snake River," which has got some great guitar FX and mid-song wow and flutter that shakes loose the cobwebs, and "Drive #47" is pure desert dwell, be it Santa Fe, Santa Cruz, or the Southside of the fucking moon, giving you that out of body experience as your spirit sinks beneath your senses. They've been doing it for six albums and some fifteen years since they first sparked up the desire to get a high off a heavy coded guitar buzz, and so one might say they're something of a latecomer veteran of the Chevy Van scene.