Lovingly pinched from The Obelisk: Following last year?s live CD / DVD excursion The First Landing with a new self-released, self-titled studio full-length, North Carolinian collective Tasha-Yar emerge from the wooded hills they call home with a much more realized vision of their sound than they presented in 2010. The six-piece are firmly entrenched in the space rock genre, and the eight tracks on Tasha-Yar make the most of analog synth in the classic ?70s tradition (though modernly produced), balancing the occasional heavy rock groove against all manner of underlying swirls and flourishes.

Like much of its sonic ilk, Tasha-Yar is headphone-ready in terms of revealing its subtleties best with direct contact, but even in the car, the band get their point across. They like Hawkwind. They like Ash Ra Tempel. They enjoy the occasional cosmic excursion. Even better than Tasha-Yar are at making those points, however, their ability to balance ambient soundscaping with driving psych puts them in a different class entirely when it comes to the new league of interstellar seekers.

Although they?re immediately notable for their connection to über-hip North Carolina outfit U.S. Christmas, Tasha-Yar veer more directly into echoplexed churning and have less of a focus on outright tonal thickness. The double-guitars of Chad Davis and Ben Teeter take the lead on a couple of the tracks ? opener ‘Twisted Sage’, the shorter ‘Flight of the Scanners’ and later into ‘Empty Hand’, but more than that, they?re merely participants in a bigger happening.

Both Teeter and Davis also contribute synth, and Tom Devlin III handles nothing but, so with the potential for half the band to be tripping out on knob-twiddling at any given moment alongside bassist John Presnell, drummer Tim Greene and vocalist Joe Sample, it?s safe to say Tasha-Yar give considerable emphasis to the lush aspects of their sound. Indeed, as much as the periodic ?heavy part? acts as an offsetting moment of excitement, many of Tasha-Yar?s highlights come in the form of the quiet interplay between the synth and guitar, as with the beginning of opener ‘Twisted Sage’, which takes the first four of its total eight minutes to affect a slow build around shifting frequencies in and out of the aural spectrum.

Continue reading: The Obelisk » Blog Archive » Tasha-Yar Go in Search of, and Find, Space.
(Courtesy of The Obelisk / JJ Koczan)