Den Stora Vilan - LiveGrodor (2012)

200 copies produced - Sloow Tapes (Belgium) - CS40

We had been talking about this tape for a couple years now: a buncha killer livejams by the great Swedish band Den Stora Vilan (which supposedly translates something as ‘The Great Rest’). Long mellow West Coast influenced psych jams (think ‘American Beauty’ era Gratefuld Dead) meets Neil Young with a bit of Trad Gras Och Stenar thrown in.

"Fantastic cassette from this contemporary Swedish psych rock group who sound so completely out of time that they might’ve washed up on a deluxe Little Wing issue back in the day: Den Stora Vilan combine west coast guitar psych with a heavy organ sound and a vocalist who comes over like a hypnotic Bryan Ferry backed by The Dead’s Donna Godchaux. The guitar comes straight out of the Cippolina/Kurihara school, with massively extended bouts of tremolo-wrought string confusion over the kind of doomy keyboard work that’s somewhere between German teen punks Ainigma and the apocalyptic gospel of D.R. Hooker. Throw in some of the monolithic weight of Scandinavian freak orchestras like Trad Gras Och Stenar and International Harvester and some great Dead-styled navigations of freedom volk and you have another aces-up side of classic extended psych rock from a label that consistently turns up peerless weirdo sides." - Volcanic Tongue