Over the past two years or so, I’ve written a bit about the Bay Area-based avant-garde free rock/psych rock collective Dire Wolves, and although the act has gone through a number of lineup changes, the act which is currently comprised of founding member Jeffrey Alexander (guitar, synths), who has also had stints running Secret Eye Records and as a member of Jackie O’ Motherfucker and Black Forest Black Sea; Georgia Carbone (vocals); Brian Lucas (bass); Faun Fables’ Sheila Bosco (drums, piano); Village of Spaces’ Arjun Mendiratta (violin) and Spires that in the Sunset Rise’s Taralie Peterson (sax), the act has a long-held reputation for crafting lysergic and hypnotic music — and for being incredibly prolific, releasing over a dozen efforts since their formation back in 2008. 

Slated for a June 28, 2019 release through Beyond Beyond is Beyond Records, the Bay Area’s forthcoming album Grow Towards the Light is officially the band’s fourth full-length album, and the album marks the first, full-length effort with Carbone contributing vocals — typically with Carbone signing in her own invented language. The album as the band’s Jeffrey Alexander explains in press notes “thematically tries to express the ‘interconnectedness of all things.” 

Clocking in at a little over 10 minutes, the album’s latest single “Spacetime Rider” is a expansive and free-flowing jam centered around shimmering guitars, a motorik groove. slashing bursts of violin and Carbone’s ethereal, Nico-like wailing. And while bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Velvet Undergound, the track will further cement the JOVM mainstays reputation for mesmerizing and trippy jams with a painterly air; but along with that, the track possesses a cosmic glow — the sort of glow you’d see traveling across the spacetime continuum.