Well, this is a funny way of reeling it in. White Hills, those hyperprolific purveyors of jaw-clenching, brain-warping psychedelia, aren't ones to shy away from the sprawl; why solo for three minutes, main man Dave W. seems to always be saying, when a dozen minutes will do? On the other hand, "songs" have rarely felt like much more than jumping-off points for the band's interstellar overdrive. Frying on This Rock-- their third LP for Thrill Jockey in as many years-- goes about things a little differently, with W. and company arriving at the studio with a few things worked out, a fairly marked shift in philosophy for a band who've long been fond of winging it. With noisenik legend Martin Bisi behind the boards, though, their wilder, woolier side's in good hands, and Frying on This Rock mostly finds White Hills with their freak flags hoisted well above half mast, with any and all overtures toward coherence obscured by billowing clouds of feedback.
"Song of Everything" rips itself open like Deep Purple's Book of Taliesyn played at an advanced RPM; the band stomps as W. grunts, not-so-gradually building to a neuron-unsettling pummel. It's clear from the first few seconds of this gnarly "Song" that Bisi's not exactly there to clean up anybody's act, but he seems to've helped the oft-messy White Hills suss out their sound a little bit; where many of their earlier recordings seemed overstuffed to the point of claustrophobia, Frying feels expansive, grandiose even. "Song" surges into the pulsating "Robot Stomp", the sound of your head being repeatedly crushed by heavy machinery while a symphony plays mockingly in the corner; over a dozen-plus minutes, with something like malevolence on their minds, W. and bassist Ego Sensation twist a few undulating notes around each other into a near-maddening climax. Both beauteous and brain-tenderizing, "Stomp" is This Rock's greatest peak, its one real go-for-broke moment; it's not all downhill from there, but the trail ahead proves quite a bit rockier.
"You Dream You See" folds in Spaceman 3 swirl and pre-Superunknown Soundgarden smash, complete with a Kim Thayil-nodding wah-wah from W. running up the sides of the track. It's at about the three-minute mark that "Dream" begins to plod; unlike the rest of Rock, "Dream" starts much as it ends, and since the song itself is not much more than a mantra-like chorus with some space for guitar breaks, it never quite justifies all six of its minutes. W.'s gruff vocals have long been White Hills' weak spot on wax; the guy just doesn't have the pipes to cut through his own din, and for all Bisi's strides toward sonic separation here, pretty much whenever W. steps to the mic, his husky howl gets a little lost in the undercurrent. The swirling "Pads of Light" smartly finds a way around that particular problem by not even trying to match W. to the gale force of the music; the tune reaches its summit early before sliding off into Rock's trippiest territory, an echoey, near-Floydian float complete with promethazene-soaked mantra recitations from a deeply stoned W.
Arriving after the time-dilating "Pads", though, closer "I Write a Thousand Letters (Pulp on Bone)" can't help but feel a little sluggish. The track, Frying's longest, seems to take forever to get going: W. slowly turns the same riff over and over again, and it's not until roughly the 12th of its nearly 14 minutes that you realize they're actually getting somewhere with it. Though it does eventually bow out on something of a high, in the wake of the towering "Robot Stomp" and the sharp turn in the middle of "Pads", "Thousand Letters" lacks urgency, and the track's eventual arrival at its not-all-that-high point feels like little more than a foregone conclusion. Ending on a non-starter's one thing, but the sluggish "Thousand Letters" fills up a good third of Frying; taken together with the last several unnecessary minutes of "You Dream", you've got an LP with some serious balance issues, one that peaks too early and peters out too soon. Frying isn't the song-centric platter promised in the press packet-- which, going on "Dream", was probably for the best-- but this is still White Hills at their most deliberate and, "Stomp" aside, their least wild. But, like any good psychonauts, it's when White Hills really let go that all the truly revelatory stuff starts happening.
