Valis - Head Full Of Pills

  by Andrew Carver

published: 25 / 9 / 2004

---

Review

After the downfall of desert rock titans Kyuss, Joshua Homme went to work as a guitarist for Seattle group Screaming Trees … what might the world of music be like if he hadn’t? The Queens of the Stone Age and Mark Lanegan’s solo career would likely be much in  very different, if any, form – and there’s be no Valis. While Seattle’s Screaming Trees were sleep-walking into nonexistence, Tree guitarist Van Conner and brother Patrick went to work with their own stoner rock side-project. 'Head Full of Pills' is their third album ; it’s on the Small Stone label, and sounds quite a bit like the rest of that label’s output. While not quite at the peak of Sasquatch, there’s plenty of heavy riffs , Van and Patrick’s capable vocals and solid rhythm work from bassist Adrian Makins and drummer Sean Hollister and, er, “trip” by Wes Weresch (I think they meant to say “keyboards” … didn’t they?). The only real drawback is some fairly duff lyrics – not bad, but tending to be simultaneously too blunt and vaguely depressing, as in the title track. In sum, it’s a cool trip, but kind of a bummer, dude.

Track Listing:-

1 Welcome To Homeschool
2 Head Full Of Pills
3 Voyager
4 Humanzee
5 Motorbike
6 We Got A Situation
7 Across The Sky
8 Ape Canyon
9 World Of Decay
10 Perpetual Motion Machine
11 More Moke

Label Links:-

http://smallstone.com/
https://twitter.com/ssrecordings
https://www.facebook.com/smallstonerec
https://www.youtube.com/user/SmallSton
https://smallstone.bandcamp.com/