Bone Wars en découverte sur LRdR Sue The Rex
Brought to you by millions of years of evolution, Bone Wars are a fearsome psych-rock quartet from Yorkshire, blending classic psychedelia, heavy rock, funk and Turkish psych into an eclectic, high-energy sound that is as comfortable with a huge riff as it is with an eight-minute improvisational freak-out. Named after the late-19th-century rivalry between American palaeontologists racing to uncover new dinosaur species, Bone Wars turn a fascination with prehistoric creatures into the inspiration for a collection of songs about dinosaurs, extinction, geology and the strange stories behind the science. Their sound draws on the classic psychedelia of Pink Floyd, Hawkwind and The Zombies, the contemporary explorations of The Oh Sees and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, the funk of Parliament/Funkadelic, the electric experimentation of Miles Davis, Turkish psych from Mogollar and Altın Gün, and the heavier instincts of Led Zeppelin and The Who. At the centre of it all is a band that thrives on improvisation and musical chemistry. Songs are mapped out with enough structure to give the music direction, then opened up to allow the four musicians to explore dynamics, texture and rhythm. The result is music that can move from a tight, hook-driven rock song into sprawling psychedelic territory without losing its sense of momentum. The album's prehistoric subjects provide an equally eclectic journey: “Terrible Lizards” looks back to the early pioneers of palaeontology, imagining their wonder and confusion as they uncovered inexplicable fossils and struggled to understand the creatures that would eventually be called “dinosaurs”. “Lizard Hips” takes a more immediate route: a shorter, punkier blast with a tight arrangement and infectious pop chorus, accompanied by a psychedelic stop-motion video featuring retro dinosaur toys. Who would attempt to summarise the confusing distinction between the lizard hipped and bird hipped dinosaurs in a song...Bone Wars would! “Pangea” moves even further back in geological time. Conceived as an imagined opium dream experienced by an early geologist piecing together the colossal forces that shaped the landmasses of the modern world, it moves between a moody, bluesy section and faster passages that ride the edge of volcanic explosions and earth-shaking crescendos. Across the album, Bone Wars use prehistoric history not simply as a gimmick, but as a way of exploring wonder, confusion, violence, extinction and the immense forces that have shaped the world around us. “Brontosaurus” tells the strange story of the scientific debate over whether Brontosaurus was actually a distinct species from Apatosaurus. Musically, the song mirrors that uncertainty, shifting between two distinct sections around a propulsive riff. “Tar Pits” began life as a blues-influenced riff that guitarist and songwriter Leo Brazil had been carrying around since high school, loosely inspired by Robert Johnson's “Preachin' Blues”. After watching a documentary about the La Brea Tar Pits, Brazil began writing, eventually arriving at the hook, “their fate it lies down below in the tar pits.” This song became a perfect example of Bone Wars' collaborative approach. After establishing the basic structure, the band deliberately left space for improvisation, putting the verses and choruses up front before dropping almost to a whisper and gradually building into a crushing psychedelic frenzy. What starts as a short, punky rock song develops into an eight-minute prog-psych journey, reflecting the suffocating inevitability of the tar. “Sue The Rex”, named after the largest and most complete T. rex specimen ever discovered and the legal battle over ownership, is an improvisational jam built around Eastern scales, building through fierce crescendos and showcasing the band's appetite for musical exploration. “The Final Morning” takes a more melancholy turn, imagining the unlucky dinosaurs born on the very morning that the asteroid brought their 170-million-year reign to an end. A mellow, emotional finale, it explores the band's softer psychedelic side and carries echoes of the expansive approach of The Flaming Lips. The four-piece coalesced around jazz/funk bass player Sully Evans. Drummer Ben Wallbanks is a founding member of deluxe garage-blues outfit Knuckle, while keyboardist Steven Beever has appeared in numerous classic Yorkshire outfits including Nu-Popes and Land Sharks. Guitarist and vocalist Leo Brazil has spent years developing his esoteric songwriting across a succession of bands. Bone Wars are building something deliberately difficult to pin down: part psych-rock energy, part funk workout, part Turkish fever dream, part dinosaur documentary from another dimension. For radio and reviewers, the album offers plenty of entry points—from the immediate hooks of “Lizard Hips” and the driving intensity of “Brontosaurus” to the expansive improvisation of “Sue The Rex” and “Tar Pits”, and the atmospheric emotional pull of “The Final Morning.” As befits their chosen genre a lot of the songs are quite epic in length so for radio there are some shorter more radio friendly edits in the downloads folder below. Bone Wars recorded and produced this album entirely themselves and this DIY ethos is present in the album artwork too with the handmade fabric collage of the cover and diorama sculpture on the rear being a real antidote to the AI age we find ourselves thrust into. There are also two homemade music videos, created using toy dinosaurs and a careful application of some pyrotechnics in the back garden.