“The people who played on this stage today changed music,” states Chris Goss, headlining the Electric Ballroom with Masters of Reality. A bold statement perhaps, but there’s no denying that Desertfest abounds with stoner rock royalty. As Goss lists the people he’s talking about, you know it makes sense: Mario Lalli, Nick Oliveri, Brant Bjork, Alain Johannes, amongst others. Mr Goss himself had a massive influence, too, of course. It’s true that the burning bowl at the core of Desertfest’s pipe will always be a fuggy mélange of stoner, psych, doom, drone, and all that good stuff. But – having been lucky enough to attend Desertfest almost every year since its inauguration in 2012 – I’ve seen it move on from predictable flavours to a more diverse, heady smoke. Before this already dwindling metaphor burns out entirely, here’s an idiosyncratically arranged selection of hits from the 2024 edition. It’s just a very brief toke, but hopefully has you hooked. I don’t know if it changed music, but we all got gloriously high on the pungent sounds and the phenomenal atmosphere of Desertfest 2024.
Nick Oliveri (centre). Photo: Jessy Lotti
Nick Oliveri has only slightly calmed with age: his bass tone, and indeed his whole personality, is still right up in your face. Launching in with the super aggro punk banger ‘13th Floor’, Mondo Generator kick off my Desertfest at a wild pace – and maintain it with ‘Fuck You I’m Free’, which Oliveri gleefully dedicates to the LA police department. Given that Desertfest is basically built around the scene-godfathers Kyuss, it’s pretty easy to win over this crowd with a cover. Mondo go for the big guns with ‘Supa Scoop and the Mighty Scoopa’ – Oliveri’s favourite Kyuss song “that I’m not even on!” – and the crowd gets down to a serious boogie, grooving onwards with another Kyuss cover, ‘Allen’s Wrench’. Oliveri references the legendary Kyuss reform/no-reform-feud again, covering one of his own solo songs ‘Kyuss Dies!’, and he’s launching himself into the crowd for a noisy finale before I’ve realized that they’ve played a whole, glorious, set.
Nick Oliveri – Mondo Generator. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Clad in black, red, and green suits, Masters of Reality are as sharply dressed as they are impeccably brilliant live. Chris Goss is a somewhat dour host, who informs us that he hurt his leg “in Holland, so I’ll sit my fat ass down.” Everyone cheers when Alain Johannes, virtuoso guitar maestro, walks on-stage but the rest of the band consists of Masters stalwarts Paul Powell on bass and John Leamy on drums – and it’s a killer combination. Their set comprises tracks from most of their albums, including big songs like ‘Domino’, ‘The Blue Garden’, ‘Rabbit One’, and ‘Also Ran Song’, and it reaffirms their status as the best blues band you won’t hear on the radio. “Tell the BBC to play this shit,” quips Goss, bemoaning the state of modern pop music.
Chris Goss & Alan Johannes – Masters of Reality. Photo: Tim Bugbee
I’m pretty ecstatic when Johannes announces that they’ll play his “favourite Queens of the Stone Age song that’s really an Alain Johannes song”, referring to the Desert Session classic ‘Hanging Tree’. It’s another song that Josh Homme popularized yet never improved. And it’s such a beautiful, eerie version – always tantalizingly short, but not rushed like QOTSA’s – with Johannes’s vocal echoing the much-missed Mark Lanagan with whom he duetted on the original.
Masters of Reality. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Masters have yet to top their 2001 classic Deep in the Hole for me, and ‘Third Man from the Moon’ sounds as exciting as it did when I last saw them perform it over twenty years ago. It’s a shame the Ballroom’s curfew can’t accommodate personal favourite ‘High Noon Amsterdam’ as their intended encore, but an extended jam of ‘She Got Me (When She Got Her Dress On)’ suffices to demonstrate that the Masters can twist even the most familiar song frameworks and turn them into the very weirdest gold.
Masters of Reality. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Bongripper take the crown as the heaviest band of the festival, with the three-piece’s warm, pliant sound filling every inch of the Roundhouse like sonic putty. This is no-frills heaviness, needing no vocals, solos, or egos: just gorgeous, well-crafted tone, and bowel-worrying riffs. This is extreme groove, where waves of feedback can be interrupted by blastbeats or jilted by jagged, behind-the-headstock skronks. I’m pretty sure they played two tracks from latest release Empty and an older track, but to be honest it scarcely matters: all of their material synthesizes the best aspects of deep, stoner doom and delivers it in the most enjoyable and absorbing way possible.
Bongripper. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Photo: Tim Bugbee
Monkey 3. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Monkey3 are a new band to me, but clearly plenty of others are onto them judging by how heaving and sweaty it is in the Underworld. This is the kind of thing Desertfest was built for – tripped-out fuzz-rock – but with a joyous, uplifting power to the guitar’s high-sustain, lead melodies. We might be lost in space but we’re, like, kinda happy, man.
Horndal. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Named after a small town in Sweden “that doesn’t really exist anymore”, Horndal are happy that so many showed up to pack out The Dev for their first UK show, but that’s where the joy ends. There’s a Tesla strike in Sweden apparently and “they’ve employed some scabs from your country to work”, our main-man admonishes, before launching into the delicate torch-song ‘Fuck the Scabs’ from their soothing new release Head Hammer Man.
Horndal. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Horndal leave you little time to examine the dizzying array of styles they combine – driving post-punk, D-beat, hardcore punk, thrash, extreme metal in all its forms – such is their Leftist fury. It’s difficult to pinpoint what makes them stand out from the crowd of other bands who fit the above description: it’s something to do with the waltz-time they use on at least one track, and the odd, chiming clean guitar tone they use on others. Whatever; the point is that it can’t be too long before Horndal start to absolutely ruin much larger venues in a wasteland near you.
Photo: Jessy Lotti
Photo: Tim Bugbee
Ashenspire. Photo: Tim Bugbee
I’ve heard a lot about Ashenspire, and heard some of their recordings, but this hasn’t entirely prepared me for the force of the earnest, mournful timbre I’m faced with as I enter the Electric Ballroom. Truly impassioned vocals lead a band nicely coloured by saxophone and six-string bass, through melancholy tracks of something like black metal. It’s a bit like a queer version of A Forest of Stars if they focused more on bleakly realist themes and not weird Victoriana. And – clad in gym shorts, leotard, nail varnish and make-up – Ashenspire seem as proud of their queerness as they are angry about genocide: “Free Palestine” is emblazoned on the monitors and screamed into the crowd. Avant garde doesn’t do Ashenspire justice, but they’ll do sonic social justice to you in the bleakest and most thought-provoking manner possible.
Scott McLean – Ashenspire. Photo: Tim Bugbee
There’s nothing avant garde about Kadabra, whose stoner rock-n-roll deals with occultism and folk horror, but distinguishes them from the array of excellent – if sometimes slightly indistinguishable – occult proto-metal stuff that abounds. This heavily-tattooed trio from Washington state certainly go hard. There’s little time for banter – beyond a quip about “the land of the free, the land of the brave…9/11” – as they plough through killer cuts from their two records. ‘The Devil’ and ‘White Willows’ stand out, with wonderful moments of our bass man lost in space, eyes rolled back in his head, as their guitarist’s demeanour somehow makes his freak-out solos looks chill. This is absolutely no-nonsense, good-time/bad-time rock music rich with swagger, melody and charisma.
Kadabra. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Lodestar, formed following the split of rap-rockers Senser, play a pretty unique brand of stoner prog that draws on the best parts of Nu Metal. (You remember: the Nu Metal that shaped your youth until you decided it’s cool to hate.) It’s hard to miss their guitarist Haggis, such is the glory of his kilt and his bagpipe-like guitar harmonies, around which Lodestar’s vocalist Heitham winds his distinctively angsty melodies. You can hear the weight that new bass-player Charlie brings to their sound on the suitably occult-themed new track ‘Sigils Burning’, alongside the kind of chugging riffs you’d find in pounding industrial metal. Deploying early tracks like ‘Another Day’, Lodestar integrate slap bass, thrash grooves, scrabbly moments of dissonance, and the kind of biting raps found in their earlier project to excellent effect. It’s “another day, another disaster” but a smash of a set for Lodestar’s Desertfest debut.
Lodestar. Photo: Tim Bugbee
Mike Muir – Suicidal Tendencies. Photo: Jessy Lotti
I’m not sure if I fully get Suicidal Tendencies – does the thrash and the hardcore truly meld? – but they put on the most energetic show you can possibly imagine. Since forming in 1980, they’ve had a huge roster of talented musicians in their ranks: tonight they range from Tye Trujillo, son of Metallica’s Rob, on bass at the tender age of 19, up to founding member Mike Muir, now into his 60s. All five of the band are going nuts for the entire time: running the breadth of the wide Roundhouse stage; jumping from cabs; climbing across the cabs; pogoing on the spot; foot up on the monitors; crowd-surfing whilst still playing.
Suicidal Tendencies. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Mike Muir – Suicidal Tendencies. Photo: Jessy Lotti
The best bits are where they suddenly lock into catchy and thrashy riffs, following prolonged, intense periods of the kind of messy noise you might usually end a set with. Mike comes across as a cross between a personal trainer and a pastor, spitting inspirational life advice to a rowdy audience. About the only moment of silence throughout this long set is the few seconds prior to the longest of the numerous solo spots given to Tye tonight: needless to say, he’s already a ferociously accomplished bass player, who looks entirely relaxed as he executes double-time, finger-style runs and extravagant slap routines whilst striding along the henge of speaker stacks. This is what a headline show looks like!
Tye Trujillo – Suicidal Tendencies. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Photo: Jessy Lotti
Let’s meet late at the Black Heart and get weird and sweaty with Stinking Lizaveta. Isn’t that fun to say? Say it again. It comes from Dostoyevsky, don’t’cha know. And they’re even more fun to see play, trust me. Stinking Lizaveta isn’t just a great name: they’re one of the best live bands I’ve ever seen in over twenty years of gigs. We have Yanni on Les Paul, Alexi on electric double bass, and Cheshire on drums, positioned front-centre.
Stinking Lizaveta. Photo: Jessy Lotti
Effectively leading the band, the green-haired Chesire manages to be utterly wild and very precise; skittish and quirky, she’s constantly tightening this, distracted by that, laughing at who knows what, pointing a stick at Yanni, or clambering around the kit – without missing a single, literal beat. Alexi is the calmest, but he sure makes that thing moan and sing. Yanni doesn’t so much play the guitar as wrestle crazy beautiful notes from it – with his plectrum, fingers, teeth, the drum kit, anything; if he’s not screaming into his guitar pickups, he’s brandishing it high, blipping the frets against the PA speaker like an extra-terrestrial slide guitar.
Cheshire – Stinking Lizaveta. Photo: Jessy Lotti
A stand-out moment is the song they dedicate to a friend of the band: recently fallen stoner-doom legend Dave Sherman, who played with Spirit Caravan and Earthride amongst others. Falling mid-way into a frantic and jubilant set, the tributes that Yanni and Cheshire pay to him at the mic – full of quirky personal anecdotes – are moving, but the new song they debut in his name (‘Sherman’s March’) speaks louder than words. Much louder, obviously: an elegy spoken in the language of huge warm chords and a solemn, descending melodic pattern.
Yanni – Stinking Lizaveta. Photo: Tim Bugbee
These talented weirdos never stop jamming, and they’ve immediately dug into a new groove, just as raw, frenetic, and virtuoso as the last. There’s one more serious moment tonight, when Cheshire breathlessly addresses the crowd: “Thank you for giving us what we always wanted. That’s not even a joke.” Despite the craziness, there aren’t many jokes here: they feel every single note they play deeply indeed. With their explosive energy, phenomenal musicianship, and brilliant on-stage dynamic, this crew encapsulates everything I love about this festival – it gives you everything you wanted from it and so much more.
Stinking Lizaveta. Photo: Tim Bugbee
And so the band who play the final note of Desertfest 2024 get my final words on the subject: Stinking Liza-fucking-veta!
