by Álvaro Molina (@alvaromolinare)
Welcome to the dreamy and gloomy refuge of Jason Simon’s cosmic Americana! Simon is a restless troubadour when he feels in the mood for it, or a warlock of thick stoner riffs when drifting through the Dead Meadow. His new album, A Venerable Wreck, is a travelogue of exciting psychedelic country and breezy vintage rock. Released via Chilean cult label BYM Records (Chicos de Nazca, The Ganjas, Vuelveteloca, La Hell Gang), this is a recording that stands as both an open book of tales from the mind of its artist and as the warm soundtrack for your very own summer reveries.
Simon’s relationship with the Chilean label – that recently celebrated its 10th anniversary – goes back to 2016, when Dead Meadow visited the country to play at local Festival En Órbita and at BYM’s headquarters in Santiago. This turned out to be an intimate, lysergic backyard experience. The visit left Simon comfortable and impressed with the label’s work, and he soon decided to work with them in any way possible.
Dead Meadow and Simon’s solo music output has a backwoods spirit lurking in the background, a mythical figure that weaves together most of the themes of venerable stories and ritualistic experiences. You can almost grasp the greasy, smoky, and humid atmospheres of an old forest or a damp marsh. In his solo projects, Simon tries to expand these feelings further, with releases like the dusty Old Mexico or the sprawling southern gothic sound of Familiar Haunts. This narrative focus reaffirms the sense of an anachronistic body of work, one that can subtly resemble the heartfelt songs of Blaze Foley and Jim Sullivan or the cosmic Americana music of Bill Madison and F.J. McMahon.
On A Venerable Wreck, Simon mixes epic first-person poems, ballads of memory and desire, while constantly stirring the ground looking for new musical paths. The album-opener “The Same Dream” strikes us hard with its banjo-heavy drone and takes us immediately to a dank and hot summer afternoon where we ramble through delusional thoughts. It is a gloomy mood setter, where the bucolic meets a bleak mindscape.
Some of these songs find Simon strolling to pastoral sceneries looking for safe havens. “See What It Takes” is like a spiritual tribute to melancholic troubadours growing from rustic stems, whereas “Jupiter,” “No Entrance No Exit,” and “Moments of Peace” dig the heritage of heroic folk songs and gospel mystique.
The title track, however, is the perfect track to hinge the album on and to understand Simon’s aspirations and unwillingness to be repetitive or monothematic. Bluesy and sticky dub, the ambience feels like if Augustus Pablo or The Congos went on to meet Neil Young and share some shrooms on damp midsummer rituals. The dubby atmospheric melodica reappears on “The Old Ones,” the most stoner-oriented song on the album and, perhaps, a reminder of Simon’s roots.
Joined by a number of musicians, including Nate Ryan of The Black Angels, Plucky Achondo of The Warlocks, and fellow Dead Meadow band-mate Mark Laughling, Jason Simon’s release is a superb narrative of what the artist has come to be: a meandering and kaleidoscopic voice on the psych world. Even though he refuses the will to remain slotted in it, and he’s more than happy to keep digging venerable and new possibilities, his invitation is open. We can hop in and drift through the timeless meadows of his music.