Carlton Melton is: andy duvall – drums/gtr; clint golden – bass; rich millman – gtr/synth; and anthony taibi – synth/gtr.
Northern California psychedelic sorcerers Carlton Melton are brain surfers, mind trippers, ... “psychlists,” if you prefer. The band will take your head for a ride, occasionally rushing at superluminal speeds through a wormhole or gliding softly on a gentle breeze in a leafy glade. Sometimes your brain needs to rage, and sometimes it needs to repose.
For a decade and a half, the band has yo-yo’ed, almost schizophrenically, between these two modes: walloping space jams with furious guitar solos in one hemisphere of the brain and ethereal, feather-light splashdowns in the other. Not to mention a track here and there that builds from the latter into the former.
But with two new releases in 2023, the band has evolved. Whether psych rock or ambient trance, their sound remains driving, organic, and flowing. With the addition of Anthony Taibi (White Manna, DDT), however, the group’s metal freak-outs are Hawkwindier and their droning kraut trances are Spacemen 3-er. In January, the quartet released the playfully spacey Resemble Ensemble, recorded in Taibi’s home studio 3D Light. October now sees the band Turn To Earth, a work with scents of Autumn, a season of death and transition. The cover art evokes a vine- covered, electric crucifix. The sound is, well, earthy but also gritty and striving towards change. The album was recorded in Fall 2022 and now harvested in Fall 2023.
Phil Becker (Terry Gross, Pins Of Light) contributed drums and percussion to a few tracks on Turn To Earth, recording the album at El Studio in San Francisco. With Becker at the helm, the synths have become more prominent (“Cosmicity,” “Roboflow,” “Migration”) and the tone heavier on the doom (“Cloudstorming,” “Unlock The Land,” title track): several moments could even serve as background music for epic dark fantasy films like Conan the Barbarian, Fire and Ice, or Heavy Metal.
As exquisite as Turn To Earth is, Melton are best appreciated as a live act: their recordings as well as their gigs are largely improvised – not so much composed as birthed. And yet their most recent tour ended abruptly and perilously. The group had to cancel its final three shows once members were admitted to Arnhem hospital in the Netherlands. Five years later, reinforcements have strengthened the band and restocked its arsenal of great tracks.
After the rockus interruptus of that 2018 tour and the tantric tease of the intervening Covid lockdown, Melton have some unfinished business. An October 2023 tour is poised to set the freshly minted quartet back onto the stages of Europe and within the cerebral folds of its fans.
Turn To Earth, sure ... but keep your head in outer space.
eric bensel , Paris , August , 2023
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Carlton Melton, from Northern California, are now a practising fourpiece in the arts of melted-minds psychedelia.
With the added kraut-oomph and sike-flutter of fellow Californian Anthony Taibi (whom you may know as being a member of White Manna, and DDT with Andy), Rich Millman, Andy Duvall, and Clint Golden have now embellished the Carlton Melton sound.
Pushing forward as a fourpiece, the band recorded Resemble Ensemble in July 2021 (just before Andy moved back over East!) at Anthony’s home studio, 3D Light in Freshwater, CA. Anthony did all the recording and mixing. The Melton Magick Karpet settled, and our favourite contemporary sikedelic warlords plugged in, amped up and let it flow…and flow it does. From the krautrock fuelled pszych-raga of Prescribed Skies, to the fluid dronescape of Elsewhere that welcomes you into its arms with a warming tone, almost a missing Spacemen 3 demo at the feast here… So The Story Grows has the drone scraping through a murk of dazzling feedback and pummel, with the fuller sounding Melton giving the genre a proper wobble, hold on to your brains people…
High Alert… whas this? Synth and guitar interplay jambusting, this is the Melton wigging out and almost interweaving 70s high table rock with some odd and downright perverse synthfunkpunk rhythms… get weird… or get wired… or both… easily done here. Closing out the album with Route Thirteen is the road trip home…they’ve been, they’ve massaged and mangled your synapses, plug in the satnav and take the higher-route home…if you get our drift.
Carlton Melton, starting 2023 in a better place than most, soaring high on their synaptic-dazzling magick karpet.
( simon k December 2022 )
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Labor Day Weekend 2017,
A heatwave beat down on Point Arena, California gifting Mendocino County with one of the hottest weekends on record. Somewhere nestled in the wooded landscape of Redwoods that touch the clouds with ease sat a geodesic dome where psych rockers Carlton Melton created their hazy "dome rock". And on that oppressively hot Labor Day weekend Andy Duvall, Rich Millman, and Clint Golden said the hell with the heat and commenced to expand their minds and plug in, turn up, and freak-out.
Recorded after the band's mostly ambient Hidden Lights EP and a year before the next proper full-length Mind Minerals, the fellas got together for a smoldering Northern California jam session and to celebrate Andy's 50th rotation on the third rock from the sun. Letting the dome guide them where it may Carlton Melton did what they do best, get loud and expand their minds via buzzing guitars, slinky bass lines, tribal rhythms, and far out synths.
The results of that rock and roll heatwave can now be heard on Microwavelengths, a 5-track excursion into free form psych, hazy drones, and all out fuzz freakouts that sound as if Hendrix' Experience were hipped to Krautrock in some kind time/space conundrum before Krautrock was a thing.
Eschewing the studio sheen of their last few album releases, Microwavelengths is a gritty lo-fi record that locks into the band's early releases; set up a couple mics in the dome, make sure there's plenty of beer iced down, and hit record. Duvall, Millman, and Golden, along with help on the drums from Brian McDougall on a couple tracks, set controls for the heart of the sun. There's barn burners like "Lion's Roar" and "Alien Argument", while "Hazel Heat" finds the band in a calm pocket of contemplation.
Of course this wouldn't be a proper Carlton Melton sound excursion without one epic jam, which is here in the form of the nearly 20-minute journey "Microwavelength". A groove of epic proportions, the CM crew drive this dream machine from Point Arena to the far reaches of the galaxy and back on a single tank of gas. It's a hell of a trip, man.
We're coming up on nearly 15 years since the Melton came to fruition. The band has expanded their sound both sonically and aesthetically; starting out with these fuzzy, gauzy psych/stoner jams, then taking their sound from Super 8 to Widescreen Technicolor. With Microwavelengths we get a glimpse of the band from where they started, but with the advantage of time, age, and a few more rotations around the sun under their belts.
Plug in, turn up, and freak-out with Carlton Melton and Microwavelengths. That is, if you can stand the heat. -
J Hubner January 2022
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DOME ROCK.
Nestled deep in the forests of Mendocino County in Northern California, huddled under the protective shade of towering redwoods and within earshot of frothy waves crashing against the Pacific coastline, squats a geodesic dome that has served as crucible for the experimental genius of Carlton Melton. Nature and Man operate under different logics. But here, Carlton Melton wholly entrusts this idyllic environment with the task of inspiring and guiding their musical improvisations.
The Dome has been the ideal setting to facilitate their creativity. Without forcing a specific dynamic or theme, the band inhabits its womb-like confines to improvise, explore, dream. Their music draws on psychedelia, stoner metal, krautrock, and ambient atmospherics to convey, above all else, a mood.
A prickly guitar melody will float lazily, a wall of dissonant feedback will resolve into a hypnotic drone, or a colossal riff will exhume the soul of Jimi Hendrix. One hears Hawkwind or Spacemen 3 jamming with Pink Floyd at Pompeii.
Indeed, Carlton Melton have one foot in the ancient world and one tentacle in deep space. They are both the pack of proto-humans drumming with femurs in Kubrick’s 2001 and the film’s inscrutable monolith hinting at the universe’s mysteries. The “Stoned Ape” theory holds that early hominids ingested psychedelic mushrooms that provided an evolutionary boost to their brains, helping them blossom into Homo Sapiens. Imagine such cavemen trippin’ balls, their nightmarish visions sending them into feverish bouts of rage and then gentle moments of introspection. They very well could have heard the music of Carlton Melton rattling inside their skulls, first driving our ancestors mad then upward into a higher realm.
Andy Duvall (drums, guitar), Clint Golden (bass), and Rich Millman (guitar, synths) have yet to play Pompeii, but they have already wowed crowds at European festivals such as the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, Roadburn, and Desertfest Antwerp. Live, they are jaw-dropping. On record, mind-altering.
In fact, with each album, Carlton Melton adds a subtle new element, synapses firing new neural connections. In 2020, they release new full-length Where This Leads, marking ten years of the band’s working relationship with their UK label Agitated Records and five years of recording with Phil Manley in his El Studio in San Francisco. With Where This Leads, the band rewires the listener’s mind. “Smoke Drip Revisited” is a ticklish acid flashback, “Porch Dreams” a dabbling in country psych, and “Closer” a driving, freak-out of guitar heroics.
One senses that the group is conveying a message that cannot be expressed verbally but only suggested through synth sighs, walloping rhythms, and soaring solos. Would Carlton Melton therefore be a group of stoned apes dizzily grasping for meaning or telepathic futurists communicating to us through crude man-made instrumentation?
Well, lower the stylus to find out.
Eric Bensel , Paris 2020