I Don’t Want To Take You To Another Land

Women “China Steps”

The steady bass pulse and detuned guitar rattle throughout this song get a nice horror movie vibe going on, but what really makes “China Steps” sound creepy is that the track seems to be haunted by the ghost of Layne Staley. The vocals share a similar tonality with the late Alice In Chains singer, but they are low in the mix and washed out in reverb, making the words almost entirely indecipherable, and filling the empty space in the track with a non-specific dread that amps up the already high level of paranoia evoked by the composition. Happy Halloween.

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No Age “Valley Hump Crash”

I don’t usually like it when guitars are mixed loud over a thin lead vocal, but it works very well here, mainly because the guitar seems to whoosh by like the ambient noise you get in a car going fast with the windows rolled down. I can’t hear this without thinking of being a passenger in a car going fast to nowhere in particular; it has this perfect balance of laid-back melancholy and careless momentum. The sadness is muted a bit, but despite not being a particularly good singer, Dean Spunt conveys a bit of conflicted nuance when he plaintively calls out the name Catalina over and over at the song’s climax.

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