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I once asked Bill Orcutt if he liked the Grateful Dead, because I had a vague memory of talking about them while on tour together 30 some-odd years ago. He responded that he'd tried to crack their code in college, mostly because so many of his friends liked them, but that he could never penetrate their overwhelmingly shallow sonics and chittering conversationally. Why weren't his friends more fired up by the creeping undertow of Crazy Horse, dripping with three-chord existential menace?
Since then, I've thought about the Horse/ Dead dichotomy a lot -- especially now, listening to the debut release from Orcutt, Steve Shelley, and Ethan Miller, the closest approximation of a standard power trio that Orcutt has landed in to date. Far from the polymorphic jazz-isms of his numerous records with Chris Corsano, the landscape Orcutt Shelley Miller inhabits lies fathoms beneath the convivial Cartesian coordinates of the Dead, deep in the stoner American bedrock, fed by volcanic riffage containing multitudes.
No one, obviously, is going to mistake Shelley and Miller for Molina and Talbot (or, for that matter, Orcutt for Young). But the opening chug of "An L.A. Funeral" -- which starts in the Isley Brothers' Ohio River bottomlands, but quickly washes up on Zuma Beach -- casts pentatonic reflections of Cortez, had the song-scribbling Neil witnessed the conqueror/ killer landing at Topanga Canyon instead of Veracruz.
Despite its rhythmic nods to the SoCal '60s, the overall vibe of Orcutt Shelley Miller is angular, atonal slash piled on a mid-'80s SST punk-fusionoid substrate, with Orcutt's bristling chords anchored by Miller's ebbing/ flowing bass. In the engine room, Shelley, the most beat-anchored of the trio, never quite abandons the two-and-four pocket but scrabbles around it, skitters over it, burrows under it, ultimately tapping a sort of Michael Hurley-gone-motorik vibe on the longer tracks on side two. "Four-Door Charger," easily the most tranced-out of these tracks, passes through kraut-funk on the way to a solid Klaus Dinger-meets-Lothar Meid churn (via late-’80s SY), its major key modalities fading into silence before "A Long Island Wedding" blasts its way to an overdriven econo-feedback climax.
All of this said, Orcutt Shelley Miller sounds like a fully formed beast, rather than a mere sum of its distinctive parts. For the improv shy listener, I can gladly inform you that it sounds like Orcutt sketched out a few of the heads beforehand, so there's plenty to clutch onto amidst the slashing Ginn-esque tritones, and plenty of the right-angle bursting-clockwork solos that define Orcutt's hypnotic phrasing.
Orcutt Shelley Miller, ultimately, reads like a "big rock statement" by its constituents that treads the line between good times and blown minds, and as such, it's a top-shelf repeat spinner. And as for the Dead/ Young dichotomy, while it's clear that no one's wandering too far into the Dead zone, there's an interrelationship between the instruments that's decidedly Bay Area even as the overall aesthetics are pleasingly LA -- and that, my friends, is as solid of a West Coast rock experience one might dream of these days.