The Higher Craft- The Quest into the Stepping Stone Age (Big Yellow Taxi)

The Higher Craft (THC) is an excellent psychedelic rock band that appears a few years ago out of the band Peyote Mothership and featuring Craig from the original Magic Mushroom band! I have to say that this 19 track concept-trip CD really blew me away. It is not that often these days that a band will take as much time and effort to craft a very specific trip for the listeners. This CD tells a pretty trippy and cool story and the main rock pieces are tied together very nicely by smaller strange, funny, witty and crazy pieces. The music shows a wide range of styles as well from 60s rock to Mastodon like metal! Christiana had a wonderful vision in making this record and she greatly succeeded in her quest to blow our minds! After the opening warnings you head direct into Acid Man and wow, this is a very intense and trippy song with really cool different parts and weird twists. Underworld, a far out dreamy track with a lot of water sounds leads into Gateway. Christina has an amazing presence and voice. This is a really melodic psychedelic groove track. Very tripped out at the end. Awareness Stage leads into Tribal Dominion, which has some really heavy metal guitar and is quite heavy space stuff. Again it really spaces out at the end before leading into the next mind trip. The Receiver is a very uptempo song and the band return to a melodic groove that is quite catchy but never for too long before they throw you in another direction. Far out. The Children has some movie like samples and is quite psychedelic. Memory Slides is a damn cool song with some really psyched out parts and some intense guitar and Christina almost singing like soul music and then they kick back into these intense parts. Reality is a very trippy piece that leads into City Life, which really floats and glides and is really spacey. This one was written by Craig. Visionary is another short trip out before Tidal Wave. This is a freaky song with a like 70s funk soul bass thing happening and then they change directions totally with an uptempo section with very echoey vocals and some quite high pitched ones! Fantastia is beautiful. I saw the River has some tabla drums, some eastern like guitar and spacey sounds running about. A very emotional track with amazing singing. The Stepping Stoneage is a very trippy circus track that leads into last main track, the Star Garden. This is another intense track with some heavy metal guitar and drive at times and then soft and acoustic. Curtain Call ends your trip. This is a really far out record and real trip that sadly people probably won’t sit down and go through the entire 19 tracks in 77 minutes. I have done it twice and it gets better each time! Treat yourself and go check out the bands super cool psychedelic web site. Great visuals and art!

http://thehighercraft.com