Blues Control - Riverboat Styx CS (2006)

If one could hear the lineage between No Neck Blues Band and Excepter, it might sound something like the first few minutes of this tape. "Riverboat Styx" begins with the clicks of a drum machine providing the grounding for beautiful decaying lo-fi dance music. A harmonica’s honk signifies a logical switch to an outta site sludgy drone-blues/piano jam. Welcome to the world of Blues Control, a band comprised of the coolies who jam fantastic dissonant weirdness under the name Watersports. Like Ex-Cocaine, the band creates a sonic narcotic with a deconstructed classic rock template and loads of sludge guitar. This link is apparent on the downer proto-boogie of "Rolling Fog Blues." However, the band travels beyond the typical wankery of repetitive pentatonic jam and fuzz and strum layers into interstellar, genre-defying regions. Even when the song is repetitive, the band manages to keep the listener’s attention with hypnotic passages. A Tangerine Dream-aping set of sublime keyboard lines and a crashing wave of an organ drone wean the listener off the sound-dope. Riverboat Styx is an early sign of the band’s brilliance and a hint at the opiate tonalities to come in the future.