Radio Moscow: Magical Dirt

Midwest trio’s fifth record hits the spot.

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Their name may sound like the sort of monicker adopted by a bunch of cockatoo-quiffed one-hit-wonders in 1983, but this Iowa trio’s sound has much more in common with the stoner rock tradition – all fuzz-caked guitars, swirling wah-wah-flecked soloing, churning bass and grizzly-bear vocals.

Yet their choppy tempos also hint at the progressive tendencies of prog pioneers like Cream. At the same time, mainman Parker Griggs has always had a love of hooks.

The infectious shuffle riffs of So Alone and Rancho Tehama Airport are irresistible, and even if lines like ‘Gypsy fast woman, don’t you know that lies are wrong?’ sound daft enough to have been sung by Ian Gillan in his Purple pomp, they immediately stick to that patch of the brain reserved for humming nonsensical lines to yourself in the supermarket queue.

Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock