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The voice behind the windswept fuzz of stoner rock/metal acts Kyuss, Unida, and Vista Chino, John Garcia has become one of the subgenre’s most influential and unmistakable frontmen.

After some plentiful touring time, Garcia returned last year with the quasi-Kyuss reunion group Vista Chino and their debut full-length album Peace, a welcome and warm-blooded desert flower of an album that did much in helping all involved forget about the legal woes that precipitated the undoing of the now legendary Kyuss name.

 

Eager to keep the rock rolling, Garcia is now literally putting his name out there with his long-awaited debut solo album, John Garcia. Filled with notable players that run the gamut from The Doors’ Robbie Krieger on the acoustic wrap-up “Her Bullets Energy” to Danko Jones, Nick Oliveri, Dave Angstrom, and The Dwarves’ Tom Brayton and Mark Diamond, Garcia made sure to compact the disc with a flotilla of rock’s heavy-hitters.

Sounding more like a Vista Chino continuation than it does its own musical entity, Garcia’s pliant and soulful crooning makes it quite impossible for listeners to not mentally weave this effort with past incarnations. But surely the man’s fan base know what they’re getting into.

John Garcia was never going to be deemed a success or failure by its uniqueness or temerity. All that was required was groove and smoke and Garcia’s trademark vocals, qualities found in abundance here. The opener “My Mind” is a radio-friendly earworm and tracks like “5000 Miles” and “Argleben” should soothe the dusty hearts of his stoner brethren, but the more eclectic moments of “Confusion” and “Rolling Stoned,” a Black Mastiff cover, are what ultimately lend the album a sense of who Garcia truly is.

      

While many a solo record tend to sweep pretentious in the territory of a soul-cleansing confessional, John Garcia doesn’t wax as intimate as one would expect. Instead it flexes as a bona fide Garcia construction, an artist’s job well-done that yields a strong, if not familiar, batch of sandy cacti tunes.

With the aforementioned guest musicians undoubtedly having pressed their fingerprints up-and-down the song-board, Garcia’s record has a keen mixture of variety and identity, a distinction that not only marks it as a worthy additive to the Kyuss canon, but perhaps even more important, as an appealing and promising trailhead for Garcia’s solo career.

(released August 5, 2014 on Napalm Records)