ZapTown

Desert Sessions
Volumes 7 and 8
Southern Lord
Rating: 2.8 out of 5

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Desert_Sessions

Remember that part in the movie Vanishing Point where Kowalski (Barry Newman) is in the desert, and he stumbles upon a hippy commune with desert hippies playing music and religiously performing some crazy free-form dance? It felt like an existential mirage generated from the heat of the desert.

If you substitute ‘60s psychedelia with a roving dust storm of gypsy revivalism, then you get the gist of the first song “Don’t Drink Poison” from Desert Sessions.

I always thought that scene in Vanishing Point was a weakness of the movie, as is Volumes 7 and 8 of this collective.

Despite the first number, a watered down original version of “Hanging Tree” that later was re-recorded for Queens Of The Stone Age’s Songs For The Deaf, and “Poly Wants A Crack Rock” — being the finest examples in the stoner rock style — this compilation keeps a low profile that doesn’t really do its part to push the envelope like it should.

The Desert Sessions collective has always included the best in alternative performers and these two volumes are no different. Mark Lanegan, Alain Johannes, Joshua Homme and others make up Volumes 7 (Gypsy Marches) and 8 (Can You See Under My Thumb? There You Are).

Trailing towards the end of the collection (the final imprint on this collective was Volumes 9 and 10), and serving as an historical document for Queens of the Stone Age,   unless you are a deep fan of Screaming Trees or a Queens junkie looking for earlier versions of a few songs that make the lifeblood of the band, then you are not going to really want to bother with the rest. Sure Johannes’ Eleven imprint is embedded in here somewhere, but you will have this picked over if you keep that philosophy.