Kyuss- Welcome to Sky Valley (1994)

These days I love the genre known as "stoner rock", despite, as George W. Bush would have put it, not having imbibed any of the substance associated with it at any time during the last fifteen years. However, Kyuss are generally understood to have been one of the first bands associated with the genre, plus its line-up included a young Josh Homme, so it's a good band for rock family trees.

However, in the mid-'90s it was just another rock band that me and my mates like, and we didn't really see it in that context but listened to it in the same way we'd listen to Therapy? or the Wildhearts. It was always clear that it owed as much to punk as metal, and that it can also be seen as a fairly standard example of good '80s heavy rock in terms of its guitar sound.

However... thev production is different, ethereal, trippy. And this '90s rock sound happens within a structure which is very much not just verse-chorus-rinse-repeat. This, like all Kyuss albums, is not so much a collection of songs as a soundscape. And it is, in case I haven't made it clear, bloody good.