Fully Baked

Might I start proceedings gentle readers with a warning? I fear that there may have been drugs used during the writing, recording and post production of Nebula To The Centre. I am sorry.

Oh when will these incredibly cool, terminally laid-back, wasteoid Californian stoner rock bands learn that drugs just aren’t cool?! Sure, you get to journey to the centre of all being, see new colours whilst remaining elegantly wasted whilst writing great tunes, travelling the world, laughing a lot and hanging out with lots of other cool folk, but there are downsides … like, um … oh, and, umm … well, there just are.

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Takin' off to the center of the universe
Crawlin' down to face big sunshine
Swirled colours collapsing our mind
Takin' off to the endless sky

Gonna land in a new horizon
I don't know what you'll find
Spinnin' softly in a new stratosphere
Trippin' till the end of time

To the centre, to the centre

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Formed when guitarist Eddie Glass and drummer Ruben Romano acrimoniously left, my beloved, Fu Manchu in 1997 and teamed up with an earlier Fu refugee, bassist Mark Abshire. To The Centre is Nebula’s debut LP from 1999*. From the excellent cover pic on in, this is some primo stoner shit, trust me, I never Bogarted a band on you yet. No half-baked ideas here, daddy-o, we are talking fully baked.

Whack on the opening titular cut and you are back in that panel van with the Fu’s, straight up. It’s a superb cut of fuggy stoner rock, the notes seemingly finding their way through to you from light years away. I really like Glass’ vocals on this one, you really feel his isolated head trip zipping through the air as the music growls away below. The guitar solo is short and excellent, serving notice that we are on druggier, looser turf than Fu Manchu ever roamed.

The rattling, punking ‘Come Down’ is a great shot of adrenalin and benefits from producer Jack Endino’s grungy touch, ditto ‘Whatcha Lookin’ For’ and LP closer ‘You Mean Nothing’; both excellent. ‘Antigone’ is probably the heaviest track on offer here and it really does hit hard and well. Personally I really like it when the band spread their wings wider and really let their freak flags fly.

Examples of flyin’ Nebula include:

• Clearlight: Where they stand back and jam on like it was still ’68.
• Fields Of Psilocybin: Where Nebula get their raggedy raga-on.
• Synthetic Dream: Prog-stoner-grunge anyone?
• Freedom: Churning, head-trippin’ bad boy of a track.

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As a relic of a time, place, scene and/or cosmic state To The Centre goes toe-to-toe with most everything else in the stoner rock pantheon. It isn’t a faultless set, there are a couple of missteps** and the song-writing is not quite as sharp as Nebula were capable of later. Nevertheless it is a great debut LP by three very talented guys and it rocks, big.

If you want an LP to rock away those grim reality blues then you can’t do a whole lot better. One of the best LPs to drive to that I know, if we ever get out of lockdown in this miserably corrupt mismanaged banana republic I live in I shall cue up To The Centre and just take off somewhere, anywhere. Further.

Further, man. Meet you in the fields.

1059 Down.

*preceded by a bunch of excellent EPs collected on their great compilation Dos EPs, natch.

**The faithful Stooges cover ‘I Need Somebody’ with Mark Arm on vocals is a bit pointless, it’s a great song, but we already knew that.