Magnificent Fiend

Magnificent Fiend is the second album from Howlin Rain and the first to be issued under a joint agreement between multi-platinum record producer Rick Rubin's American label and San Francisco-based indie Birdman Records. Here's the back story.

Having recorded a fistful of critically acclaimed albums with neo-psychedelic pioneers Comets On Fire, frontman Ethan Miller lit out for fresh musical territories, located somewhere between the Santa Cruz, CA-based band's familiar sonic maelstrom and more organic, melodic, groove-oriented rock that hearkened back to his halcyon daze growing up on California's "Lost Coast" (Humboldt County), home of lumberjacks, college students, unreconstructed hippies, and off-the-grid botanists.

By turns pummeling and pastoral, Magnificent Fiend oscillates between roaring, all-stops-out, Hammond organ-driven tracks and delicate electric piano passages, topped by harmonized, often dissonant guitar lines. Toss in counter-melodic bass, sometimes quirky breaks and extended instrumental sequences that are either ascending to the heavens or cascading softly, softly from the skies in sparkling showers of gunpowder and smoke. All held together by Miller's distinctive, crushed-velvet roar - redolent of British R&B giants Steve Marriott or Terry Reid - which extends to a sweet plaintive falsetto; and, as the album's oxymoronic title might imply, the lyrical content.

The sextet hit the road in fall 2007 supporting Queens of the Stone Age, and in the same year have shared the stage with rock and roll greats from Roky Erikson to Mudhoney to Acid Mothers Temple.

By T Johnson