Black Smoker [CD]

Black Smoker is a genre-blurring rock band from Tacoma, Washington, drawing from psych, post-grunge, garage, and the darker corners of punk. With influences like Dungen, Screaming Trees, Al Casey, Spiritualized, and Nick Cave, their sound layers melody and noise into something raw, atmospheric, and hard to pin down. The self-titled debut moves through twelve tracks of tightly wound observation. Songwriter George Reed-Harmon's lyrics dig into barroom dissolution, border politics, the deadening weight of modern routine, and the quiet violence of social fracture-finding the political in the personal and the extraordinary in the mundane. Members share history with Seaweed, The F-king Eagles, Truly, and Mono in VCF, carrying forward a lineage of Northwest underground rock.