“I know it when I see it.” You’re probably aware of this phrase from its association with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of hardcore pornography in Jacobellis v. Ohio. But it fits pretty well when we talk about psychedelic music too. The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Alice Coltrane, Sleep and Red Krayola may not sound similar, but you can still make the case that they’re all masters of expression based on psychedelic experience — something that is naturally subjective. What matters most is the way the music makes you feel.
Skyview Drive, the second album from Nashville’s Ttotals (the first “T” is silent), showcases the group’s ability to find all the subtle varieties in a dark palette. Singer-guitarist Brian Miles, the only constant member of the band, made the record two-and-a-half years ago with then-bandmates Marty Linville and Derek Schartung and engineer-producer Kevin White. Linville moved to New York, Schartung moved on to other projects, and Miles shopped the record around to no avail, while performing with other incarnations of the band and recording another album’s worth of songs. Thanks to the somewhat mysterious new label Great Ape Records — Miles says the label boss, who goes by Grape Jelly Jane, required Ttotals to sign a nondisclosure agreement regarding his or her identity — Skyview Drive is set to be released on Friday. The band (which now includes Watcher’s Austin Edwards and Mouth Reader’s Dylan Frost) will headline a release party at Little Harpeth Brewing on Saturday.
The brand of off-kilter, droning fuzz rock that Ttotals has been making and evolving for the better part of a decade draws on a wide range of influences, and has deep roots in Music City’s underground. Coming of age in the ’90s in the suburban isolation of Hendersonville, Miles was always looking for the most far-out music.
“What kind of saved me in high school redneck hell was buying Thrasher magazine and learning about all these other bands,” Miles tells the Scene. “Also, having the privilege of having WRVU at the time, Vanderbilt’s college radio [station]. That’s how I found out about music!”
Miles began working in music stores, making his way to the now-defunct Tower Records on West End Avenue. It was a way station for musicians, punks, hippies and freaks headed for live music venues like Lucy’s Record Shop, Exit/In, Elliston Square (which reopened as The End in 1999) or Springwater, and Miles took cues from his fellow record nerds about what might satisfy his voracious appetite for new sounds, from heavy blues-rock to shoegaze.
Miles describes Ttotals’ music as “the outer blues,” inspired by the dark emotional spectrum of the blues as interpreted by ’80 English drug-rockers Sonic Boom and J. Spaceman of Spacemen 3.
“When they were in Spacemen 3, they were almost ripping off Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker,” Miles explains. “But actually making it their own. That kind of embodies the kind of things I try to do.”
Skyview Drive puts together a puzzle from the kaleidoscopic fragments of psychedelia picked up from many different practitioners. Album opener “The One” chugs along ominously, like The 13th Floor Elevators filtered through The Black Angels’ reverb tank. The droney swagger of “Rockets Will Unite Us” zeroes in on the hypnotic haze of the slower cuts on The Stooges. The piano-driven “World Geometry” wouldn’t be out of place on Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Miles’ vocal delivery recalls Echo and the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch. All over the LP, you’ll find noises from Sonic Youth, chest-rattling heaviness from Earth, intergalactic whirling from Mercury Rev and spacious melancholy from Ride and Slowdive.
Listening to Skyview Drive feels like walking across the deck of a boat surging through rough waters. You know you’re standing on something solid, but predicting exactly where you’re headed next gets difficult. It’s disorienting, and makes you feel the cosmic scale of the universe — exactly as it should.
