The Spanish psych band Fooz are mostly known over here in the US to the truly obsessive stoner/psych fans, but over in their home country of Spain, they are apparently legends in the field of heavy, spacey stoner rock. Fooz released a couple of amazing albums on Alone Records that mixed together a heavy Hawkwind influence with the trippier side of Black Sabbath, but they ended up breaking up a few years ago. I hadn't heard anything more about what the members were up to until just recently, when Alone Records announced the release of the debut album from a group called Beiruth that has a couple of the guys from Fooz in it. Part of the recent windfall of killer heavy psych albums that we just got in from Alone, Horizonte de Sucesos is an electronics-heavy album of all-instrumental space rock that is a big departure from the 70s influenced rock that Fooz played. Harnessing the sounds of vintage synthesizers and analogue electronics, Beiruth play a kind of dark proggy space music that's closer to the soundtrack prog of Zombi and the cosmic pulse of krautrock than heavy rock. Beiruth definitely have the whole Hawkwind thing going on too, but when I say that, I'm thinking of Hawkwind at their most stoned, laid back, and drugged out. There's a heavy undercurrent to their sound, mainly in the deep, dubby grooving basslines that keep Beiruth's mesmeric stoner-space rock hallucinations anchored to earth and prevent them from spiralling out into space, and on the few tracks that have actual percussion, the band alternates between slow, dirgey drumming, tribal industrial rhythms, and washes of shimmering cymbals. Then there are the weird growling vocal-like noises that appear on tracks like "Horizonte de Sucesos", which I still can't figure out what they are. Beiruth have put together a really cool debut of dark, heavy space rock with this disc, a mix of dark dub elements, Hawkwind, Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster, Zombi and even some shades of doomy heaviness that show up in the crawling cosmic sprawl of the last track. Definitely recommended for fans of space rock, dark prog and tripped out kosmiche soundtracks. Packaged in a digipack.