Warmth - "Leave Your Wet Brain in the Hot Sun"

Warmth - Hot Sun (Digitalis 2007)

Warmth - Leave Your Wet Brain in the Hot Sun / Digitalis

Well, here we are. A new month, a new quarter, a new way forward. The dead of summer in South Carolina, temperatures regularly clocking in the mid-90s with plenty of humidity hanging about to ensure you feel that heat long after the sun has fallen away behind the trees. Closed pools incite riots. Girls never look more tan and trim. The warmth has officially arrived.

There are two kinds of summers: The ones with the carefree kids jumping and splashing with their friends devoid of car payments or school loans or intellectual gravitas, and the ones all those Zima "What if there was no beer?" commercials were inspired by in 1994. Steev Thompson has solidly soundtracked the latter, and I couldn't have found a better way of opening up this quarter than with some slow, hot, sticky, sweaty dronescapes. Escapes. Yes, there's no escaping the unrelenting heat of Helios this time. Hyperion and Theia would be proud of Leave Your Wet Brain in the Hot Sun.

And they'd be especially proud of Thompson for this particular version of a release that was initially put out on Belgium's Audiobot label nearly two years ago now as a CD-R. In those days, Thompson went under the moniker of Roxanne Jean Polise, which has a massive discography proving Thompson likes to keep busy. But that early version did not feature two bonus tracks that the patient or unknowing among us will not be gifted with under the Warmth alias. The immaculately titled "Thank You Cloud. Fuck You Deerfly." and "Watch the Animals Glisten as They Trust and Rejoice" join the tracks that comprise the title of this release for 58 minutes of scorching sun and blistering feet on the pavement of music.

Of course, like a lot of music, how you want to hear this is based on your frame of mind. Digitalis think it sounds like a dense electronic forest fog, and if I were on the other end of the calendar year reviewing this album (or partnering it with its forest-art friend House of Low Culture) I might be inclined to agree... But given where I'm at (which is nowhere near Thompson's current Holly, Michigan residence) and the fact that the name of the fucking band is Warmth, it seems only too appropriate to envision the "Raiders of the Lost Ark" face-melting in the sprawling repetition and white-out-wash of "Brain in the" and "Hot Sun," presented here. Every track on here has the same feeling to it: You start out in a sun-staring competition with sounds miles away it seems, before they gradually creep in to your conscious and by the end of the epic you're sitting there with your ears agog as the noise override grabs you by your auditory ossicles and then, just as soon as the torrent of sound and the flood of water and children and dizzy spells get to you... The sound is gone again, just a distant call in the middle of the desert. The horizon blurs and twirls and reforms itself as something else as you recover, and when you finally do, you know you've made it to the other side of Leave Your Wet Brain in the Hot Sun.

Given that fingers are starting to stick to the keys and my ability to type is being impeded, it's best that I wrap this up quickly with an awful pun: Thompson has crafted a hell of an album. But the joke isn't the best part; actually listening to this handful of noisy droners is. Get it while it's hot. Oh man, I'm on fire. But seriously folks...