In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby reacts angrily to narrator Nick Carroway’s suggestion that the past cannot be recreated. “Can’t recreate the past?” Gatsby replies incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
It’s a proposition that has plagued many a band that’s reformed years after its initial success. The Stooges could never achieve the band’s original juvenile delinquent punk attitude on the flaccid The Weirdness; conversely, The Stems picked up where they left off 20 years previous with Heads Up.
In the early 1990s, Tumbleweed rode the Zeitgeist of slacker rock cool: long hair, flannelette shirts and thundering stoner riffs. Twenty-odd years later, Tumbleweed are back, but can it ever be the same? Well, yes and no. Songs From the Other Side is a Tumbleweed record: witness the rumbling dirt-track riff that whips opening track Mandlebrot into shape, or the Sabbath-spiced musings of Sweet Little Runaway. The seven-minute Mountain is everything you’d hope from a Tumbleweed song: a swaggering sense of cool, Richie Lewis’s monotonous pizza-and-Play Station stoner drawl, Lenny Curley and Paul Heismeister trading licks like a couple of excited kids exchanging Kiss cards in 1978 (or maybe that’s just the Love Gun riff that kicks in half way through the track).
Yet there’s something different on the album, a sense of maturity and aplomb that just wouldn’t have been present all those years ago. You hear sense it on Night Owl, with its attendant simple garage riff and Lewis’s atonal B-grade horror movie lyrics; or maybe it’s the bite-sized meat and potato licks of Dirty Little Secret. And surely the Tumbleweed of yore could not have written the Heroes-via-Someloves heavy rock Drop in the Ocean? Wildfire is part MC5 shop-rat attitude, part suburban weekend warrior fun times; Hillbilly Headbanger is just a good fucking garage-psych track packed full of rollicking riffage.
And once you’re locked into the ‘weed groove, it just gets better and better. Queen of Voodoo is dumb and beautiful, Good and Evil summons up the spirit of ZZ Top and whips the crowd into a lumbering frenzy. Down and Dirty is the antithesis of pretentious rock (fuck you, Bono) and Bird of Prey puts early 70s Deep Purple on a pedestal gazes with the drooling affection of a smitten child. And then there’s the seven-minute closer, ESP, a sparkling meander into space-rock territory that could just lead to a bizarre meeting with Hawkwind at the psychedelic crossroads.
You can’t recreate the past. But you can take the ingredients of history and use them to create something even better. And that’s what Tumbleweed has done.
BY PATRICK EMERY
Best Track: Mountain
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: SABBATH, URIAH HEAP
In A Word: Weed
