Samsara Blues Experiment - One With The Universe (2017)

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Samsara Blues Experiment - One With The Universe (2017)

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Samsara Blues Experiment is back. More than three years after their somewhat disappointing album ‘Waiting For The Flood’ they have returned to form with ‘One With The Universe’. An album that secures this Berlin trio’s place at the top of the German stoner rock Bundesliga. SBE continues to merge seemingly incompatible elements such as stoner metal, blues, space rock, Canterbury prog and traditional Indian music into something that is both undefinable as well as surprisingly familiar, with subtle hints to Pink Floyd during ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’ and Jimi Hendrix’ Electric Ladyland. And finally the band manages to get rid of that irritating eternal comparison to their South-German brethren Colour Haze. Samsara Blues Experiment no longer follows but sets its own course. A course that leads along the outer boundaries of our solar system on cosmic waves of mellotrons and other obsolete oscillators and analogue synthesizers, in five steps taking a little more than 45 minutes.

As we have learned from this band, they take their time to construct a song. At ‘One With The Universe’ the shortest song still lasts for more than six minutes and the title track has a nine minutes instrumental intro. The diversity of this album makes ‘One With The Universe’ the best Samsara Blues Experiment has produced so far. The record kicks off with ‘Vipassana’, a ten minutes song that pays tribute to the band’s name by fusing heavy psych blues with Indian raga. ‘One With The Universe’ is not just free-floating cosmic progressive space rock, a song like ‘Sad Guru Returns’ shows that the band can also do grungy hard rock with some mean heavy riffing. An instrumental that has a delicate balance between the instruments: guitar, bass and drums clearly complement each other instead of two (bass and drums) serving as accompaniment for the dominant guitar. With additional samples of Indian mystic Jaggi Vasudev this is the first highlight of the album. An album that turns out to have no real weak moments and in which the clear production with the bass put prominently at the front of the mix.

‘Glorious Daze’ is another nice rocker with exquisite organ and subtle sitar. The shortest song of the album serves as a stepping stone to the longest and most ambitious track on this fourth full length. Who on earth would think of having a run-up full of guitar solos, echoes of ‘Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun’ and mellotron lasting for nine minutes before the song really takes off? Samsara Blues Experiment did and this experiment works out extremely well. Time changes, additional keyboards, there seems to be no way the band can go wrong in this song. A fifteen minutes long climax, after which the pretty awesome ‘Eastern Sun & Western Moon’ seems just a nice dessert. That would be a devaluation of both band and song, because it is again very well made. Like it was a summary of the album, ‘Eastern Sun & Western Moon’ combines heavy guitar riffing with abundant keyboards and driving rhythms. Samsara Blues Experiment has created an extremely successful trip and made one of the best stoner albums of 2017. That much can be said already.