I've liked all of the records that I've heard from Bardo Pond, it's all great, smoke-wreathed psych rock jamming delivered from deep in the dopezone, but while listening to 'em, I always inevitable finding myself hoping that the Bardo guys are going to kick in with a truly crushing riff to shatter the languid torpor of their sprawling jams, and really go into the red, ya know? Thanks to this somewhat recent new disc from Slim and his consistently amazing Archive label, we've got a full length disc from the Bardo Pond side project Alasehire, and it totally meets my aforementioned needs. Alasehire features three of the members of Bardo Pond, and on Stone Sentinels, they create three sprawling tracks of riff-heavy sludgy psychedelia that sounds like Bardo Pond on 'roids, indeed; the Gibbons brothers are on dual guitars, dropping Sabbath strength slomo riffs alongside the meandering drumming from Bardo drummer Jason Kourkonis. The 1st track "Nazca" unfurls massive Western-tinged psychedelic improvisation, almost Earth-like guitar meditations and narcotic slide guitar twang laced with blasts of powerful feedback and noise, before moving into the free-floating Sabbathian psych of "Lost City". This starts off as a cloud of hazy and dreamy ambience that drifts from mellow acoustic guitars and woodsy psych-folk but evolves into a massive tangle of crushing sludge metal riffing, sweeping oscillators, and strafing wah-wah freakout, like Hawkwind, Acid Mothers, and Sunburned Hand Of The Man filtered through heavily drugged sludgecore. And "Shroud" follows a similiar route, a far-drifting dopehaze of exploratory stoner jamming, tweaked electronic noises, Kourkonis' powerful, busy drumming constantly divebombed by spacey, superphased electronic FX and swirling feedback. Towards the end of the track, guitars and drums disappear altogether as the band bottoms out into a field of sparse electronic textures and chirping Bastard Noise-esque noise. I loved this disc, it's an immenselt spaced out slab of free psychedelia with moments of chaotic heaviness that really blast off. The disc comes in a six panel glossy full color gatefold jacket much in the same style as Archive's other recent releases, with the disc attached to the jacket on a plastic hub. It's limited to 600 copies, too.