By Andrew Bansal
August 30th 2016, The Viper Room, West Hollywood CA: Their third full-length LP ‘Apex III (Praise for the Burning Soul)’ has been one of the finest releases of the year 2016, and since the February 2016 unveiling of the album via Listenable Records, French psych rock trio Mars Red Sky has been actively touring through Europe and beyond to present their newest material. Revolving around their appearance on the Psycho Las Vegas festival, they booked a two-week US headline tour and landed in Los Angeles last Tuesday August 30th for an event at the Viper Room, put together by Church Of The 8th Day and featuring Family and All Souls as support acts. Mars Red Sky have been around for nearly a decade and started gaining a fanbase in the underground with their 2011 self-titled debut, which was released independently and discovered by Metal Assault by somewhat of a happy accident, on an exploratory BandCamp session. This isn’t a band that tours the United States often, so this was a rare opportunity to experience them live, and they put on a show that exceeded all expectations quite overwhelmingly.
Doors opened at 8:30 and at around 9:10, Los Angeles rock quartet All Souls took the stage for a set that was very easy to enjoy. With Antonio Aguilar and Meg Castellanos from the band Totimoshi on guitar and bass respectively and Tony Tornay from Fatso Jetson on drums, All Souls boast of the perfect blend of LA and Palm Desert stoner rock pedigree, and this newly founded project of theirs is just as well-done as anything these musicians have ever been a part of. They have been well-respected figures in the underground for several years, and with All Souls, they’re uniting to present some simple yet powerful melody-driven rock n’ roll. For those that attend shows at the Viper Room, it is very easy to step out into the smoking area if the band on stage is not their cup of tea, but the room was only filling in during All Souls’ set and nobody was leaving, which clearly proved that they were the right opening act for this show. They have been working on their first set of recordings and one can expect much more from them in the near future.
Next up was Brooklyn, New York quintet Family who were on their own US tour and happened to cross paths with Mars Red Sky to come together for this particular gig. In contrast to All Souls, at first they came across as a bit of an oddball in this lineup with their style of music which is truly hard to describe. But with a blend of all things prog, hardcore, metalcore and stoner rock they were an intriguing act to witness live and as their set progressed, it became more evident that they had just about enough in common with the general theme of this show to garner the attention and appreciation of this audience. Even if you hadn’t known they were from New York, you would have guessed they were an East Coast band, because stylistically they possess the kind of wild eclecticism that often typifies rock/metal bands from that area. Like Mars Red Sky, Family also played Psycho Las Vegas, and their music gives them the scope to perform and tour with bands of so many different genres that they could be on tour all the time. Without doubt an interesting precursor to the headliner.
At 11:10, Mars Red Sky began their set and turned the Viper Room into a spaceship which abducted earthlings into untraversed depths of outer space. This venue has a strict policy against bands hanging their banners and backdrops because nothing can cover the Viper Room logo which forms the actual backdrop, but thankfully this band was allowed freedom to cover the backdrop with a giant white sheet upon which they would project visuals, an indispensable part of the live Mars Red Sky experience. Performing material from ‘Apex III’ as well as the other two albums, the trio of Julien Pras (vocals, guitar), Jimmy Kinast (bass) and Mathieu Gazeau (drums) went on to orchestrate 70 minutes of pure psychedelic brilliance and left this audience completely overwhelmed by what they were fortunately getting to witness. Combining dreamy clean singing with mellow stoner rock guitar-bass interplay and extremely heavy, sludgy drumming, the heaviness even more accentuated in the live setting, Mars Red Sky put forth a high-class performance and left no one in any doubt that they are by far the best stoner/psych rock band to grace any stage in the Los Angeles area this year.
It is probably good advice to go to a Mars Red Sky as a loner because if you’re with a friend and you talk to them between songs, you’d miss the intricate interludes the band injects in the gap between one song and the next. A Mars Red Sky set is continuous in the absolute sense and just like each of their studio albums, stands strong as a single piece of music meant to be absorbed in its entirety to be fully appreciated. If Mars Red Sky existed in the ’70s playing this exact music, they’d be selling out stadiums, but as it stands in 2016, they’re bringing their grandly epic show to small clubs and bars. Conversely, if members of the Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Doors and Led Zeppelin formed a supergroup and stepped into a jam room, they would sound very much like Mars Red Sky. Comparisons and what-ifs aside, this is a band that invokes the kind of emotion and ecstasy very, very rarely felt by a concertgoer in a completely sober mental state. Here at the Viper Room, they lived up to their name with a truly otherworldly performance, one that puts them on a pedestal all of their own.
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