Since 2009, San Francisco’s Dire Wolves have put out something like ten full-lengths (including the wonderfully titled The Creator Has a Faster Van), two splits, contributed to a handful of comps, and have been the temporary shelter of twenty-something players. It will not surprise you to find out that they play a loose and perpetually evolving brand of music that is probably most easily classified as psych, but with its trilling woodwinds and droning violins has more in common with the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders (dig that title once again) than the peaky wig-outs of, like, Iron Butterfly.
On March 24, they’ll release Excursions to Cloudland on the venerable Beyond Beyond is Beyond, and today we’re premiering the album’s closer, “Cerebration Day.” Punniness aside, it’s a fitting name: the song’s ten long minutes unwind in a kind of slow serenade, gathering steam but not locomotion, spinning but not getting dizzy. It feels celebratory, yes, but it’s nevertheless an interior form of music that offers up joyfulness as a kind of trance, or at least trance as a kind of joy. What, you thought there was something going on in the outside world worth partying over?
You can give “Cerebration Day” a listen below, and preorder Excusions to Cloudland here.
