There was a time when music such as the cavernous and reverb laden sounds that Tombstones In Their Eyes made didn’t come on download, CD or even in the form of a live band. Instead it came in pill form, on blotter paper, in tabs, creating imagined music that hotwired straight into the back of the brain, a revelatory experience but a solitary one also. This double A side is the sound of a band doing its best to capture the insanity and dark haze of just such a bad acid trip and it is at once scary and beautiful, and primordial and sophisticated.
It plays with Doorsian psychedelia, desert blues stoner vibes, echoing doom and heaviness, and the same arched sub-metal sounds that defined the glorious collection of songs which made up the Fear e.p. earlier this year. And whilst Take Me Home is a weighty slice of cosmic rock and roll, Shutting Down seems, within these sonically muscular demarcations, to somehow find room for everything to breathe effectively. The result is that the latter feels more in keeping with the psyched out indie of the likes of Echo and The Bunnymen whilst the former is as solid and claustrophobic a piece of work as anything in the Spacemen 3 or The Jesus and Mary Chain canon.
It is the sound of the band continuing their dark crusade to create music which sounds like the after growl of the big bang, the collision of planets, the collapse of mountains and the sound of the history of the industrial revolution all scored as music. Nothing wrong with thinking on a grand scale I guess.