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LP
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FTR 824LP
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"On the alternate timeline where the Meat Puppets inherited the bulk of the Grateful Dead's tourheads when Jerry Garcia died in 1995, none of this would be necessary, because Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders are a household name for evolving their own musical space that overlays dusty folk, cosmic jazz, deep psych, free improv, and even (gasp!) indie rock, building an audience that ranges from open-eared curiosity seekers to deep committed music weirdos that's also yielded the Heavy Lidders an infamous sub-cult of concert tapers that you're already sick of hearing about. A lot of other things are better over on that timeline, too. But in this consensus reality (and probably the other one, too), Liquid Donnon catches the Lidders at their heaviest, 'heavy' in the Lidderverse being far from a monolithic musical idea. There's heavy like the album-opening 'From Loch Raven to Fells Point,' one of several tracks with elegant and gnarled conversational jams featuring the core Lidders lineup of Alexander alongside guitarist Drew Gardner and bassist Jesse Sheppard (both of Elkhorn) and drummer Scott Verrastro. But there's heavy, too, like 'Calliope Walker' and 'Tightroping,' featuring Gardner shifted to dream-space vibraphone, the former with saxophonist Tacuma Bradley, the latter with Christina Carter of Texas noise-psych legends Charalambides on veil-crossing wordless vocals, her first collaboration with Alexander in some 20 years. But then there's also heavy like the cover photo of Alexander's late friend and album namesake Donnon, taken at a Dead show at Rich Stadium in Buffalo in 1989, a spirit threading through the songs and weaving unexpectedly into Alexander's life decades later, emerging especially when Alexander passed through a near-death experience of his own. But, taken together, the different heavies of Liquid Donnon add up into a state of musical grace, where all the Heavy Lidders from all the universes come together as one. Just, like, imagine. Convened in 2019 on Alexander's relocation back to his native east coast, the Heavy Lidders are the latest hard-touring expression for the guitarist's music, joining a vast and tangled discography (and tape list) that includes the beloved long-running west coast Dire Wolves Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band and, before them, the Iditarod and Black Forest/Black Sea, as well as a bushel of solo play-all-the-instruments projects, a stint with Jackie-O Motherfucker, sessions with Kemialliset Ystävät and Avarus and others, and you'll have to keep digging for the rest. And while it's not hard to find tapers at Lidders gigs (and they encourage you to be one), or to track themes and songs over Alexander's many live releases, Liquid Donnon makes a new primary text, the original versions of six new pieces for the repertoire. The album closes with a devastating pairing of 'Reservoir Drop' into 'The Summer Song,' floating into a duo between Alexander's guitar and Carter's voice." --Jesse Jarnow
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LP
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FTR 795LP
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It's one thing to have founded a notable band dedicated to exploring the possibilities of psychedelic exploration in many different sounds and styles. But it's arguably pretty darn rare to have done it, as Jeffrey Alexander has, four separate times. First emerging with the Iditarod in the mid-1990s before a later world oversimplified their sound as "freak folk," you'd be forgiven for thinking Alexander had settled into things with the feedback grooves of Dire Wolves. But 2020 brought forth another incarnation in the form of the Philadelphia-based Jeffrey Alexander and the Heavy Lidders, joined by local legends like Kohoutek's drummer Scott Verrastro and Drew Gardner and Jesse Shepherd of the exploratory guitar duo Elkhorn. Once more they're here to provide some needed balm in the form of their sixth formal album effort, Synchronous Orbit, released jointly by Feeding Tube and Cardinal Fuzz labels. With three lengthy songs showcasing their interwoven skills both in studio and live settings, Synchronous Orbit finds the Heavy Lidders once more, given the appropriate album title, aiming for a beautiful trip into outer space and in the inner mind. There's guest percussion from Ryan Jewell and, in a lovely matching of voices with Alexander, a wonderful turn from the legendary Kate Wright, famed for her work in the Bristol UK acts Movietone and Crescent. Plenty of space unfolds for a sweetly trippy midsection as the players do their thing, with Wright and Alexander's vocals returning to help wrap up the trip. The core quartet keep the calm but never cool vibes leading into a steady slow-building burn, guitar parts pouring over each other like glowing layers of honey with Verrastro's drumming both keeping pace and gently altering tempos and intensity. Synchronous Orbit concludes with its longest track at twenty minutes, taken from a live show at the Milwaukee Psych Festival in May 2024. There's a heck of a wonderful wild card factor in the form of 21st century jazz experimenter Isaiah Collier, contributing not merely saxophone but bullhorn and bird calls -- a real
menagerie of sound. His performances add both depth and even more energy to the proceedings, never simply a rampage outward even at his fiercest, but
embracing the sense of community and participation in the performance.
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