CURRENTLY PLAYING: Kyuss – Blues for the Red Sun

Sometimes, I like an album enough that I listen to it daily, or at least, a few times a week. Which is the case with this album, Kyuss’s ‘Blues for the Red Sun’ from 1992. Not only do I want to listen to the music, I also want to spread the word about it to others. Hence, this blog post. Why do I listen to an album from 1992, you say? Well, in the following post I try to convince you to give it a try (Youtube links incoming after the jump!).

I’ll start out with the reason how I know about Kyuss, which fell apart in 1995, when I was just 4 years old. This is due to me being a fan of Queens of the Stone Age, which features Josh Homme as frontman, both doing the vocals and lead guitar. Josh was one of the founding members of Kyuss, thus my thirst for music as a teen led me to Kyuss. I originally had only a few songs in my iTunes playlist, but this changed a few weeks ago when I was looking for some ‘new’ additions to my music library.

This resulted in me acquiring ‘Blues for the Red Sun’, the second studio album by Kyuss, and in my opinion the best. It defined its own genre, Stoner Rock (also known as Stoner Metal or Desert Rock). Other well-known Stoner Rock bands are ‘Queens of the Stone Age’ and ‘Wolfmother’. The music itself seems to derive its origins from bands like Black Sabbath. The genre is almost dead,  Queens of the Stone Age have switched to a more mainstream sound, leaving Wolfmother as the only mainstream band to abide by the genre. The music itself features a low, droning guitar base, with repeating higher-pitched riffs, and raw vocals (but no grunting or screaming). Drums are heavily featured which results in a ‘swaying’ sound. I’ll give you an example: