Got this single from Milton Melvin Croissant III via Endless Nest distro I liked immediately that the name symbolizes that kind of royalty pretension but then at the same time it's ridiculous. There had to be a sense of humor to this single...and the black and white hand drawn sleeve with blue lettering silk screened across it in a rough matte ink.
The A-Side, "The Song Remains the Same", which is not a cover of the Zeppelin song....or is it? There's a huge majestic vibe to this. From the get go all the sound takes place in this great expanse. Guitar's decaying and fading off into the distance...crashing far off cymbals. It's a folk psyche track with teeth.
With the sweeping strum of a huge guitar, I picture Lord Milton Melvin Croissant the third on the edge of a canyon with a wall of speakers, hair blowing in the wind. The strumming electric out to the canyon bounces back in waves with a steady tambourine rhythm and a low tom pounding right into a southwestern style, native American ballad, type of a track.
The vocals are equally far off, you have to be hearing this entire composition from a distance, probably because the sheer volume from that stack isn't safe to come anywhere near. A chorus of backup vocals join in for that choir, natural church sound.. It could be this sleeve art, which was penned by MMCIII by the way, that's suggesting this kind of turquoise geography to me, or it's the only place with the uninterrupted horizon to horizon line.
It sounds like the kind of song that grew out of communing with the experience of playing. Approaching the point where monotony turns into trance and in a way this repetition clears out all other musical experience...until a booming kick drum comes in like a miles away thunderclap. It's that big sound resulting from a heck of a lot of energy. You can just hear the destruction in a sound like that. A slow strummed hypnotism, a bit of Devendra Banhart fronting the Velvet Underground.
The B-Side, "High Plains Gothic", features an even slower drone percussion and acoustic melody. There's an electric strum every 4th beat, big and heavy fading out into nothing. More distanced vocals, slowly harmonizing and the feel of a long timeless unmarked journey when a huge picked distortion melody breaks this hypnotism like the lonely chords from Neil Young on the Dead Man Soundtrack...damn I have to find that somewhere on vinyl.
It's another ambient folksong sound kicked up by this aggressive anti-folk crash of heavy distortion that rises to a plateau of dynamic and never comes back down.
It's about as perfect of a song title as I think you could ask for with this one.
Coming from a label out of Denver, CO, Ash From Sweat, it has all the feel I would expect out of that extreme environment in the arid, expanse of the west. A huge sense of space, and monotony of traveling the distance... and especially the isolation. Milton Melvin Croissant III has at least some sense of humor in his moniker if both of these psyche folk tracks are a little bleak in their outlook.
Get this one direct from Ash From Sweat Records or the Endless Nest Store.
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