Aiwass just released its badass EP “His Name Was Aiwass.” With just three tracks the EP puts you on some sort of high with its stoner/doom feel. That high paired with the tracks’ raw emotion and Aiwass’s uncomparable storytelling ability, makes this a must-listen. It felt rigid and rugged, dark and profound, rebellious, and authoritative. It sounded different and dark but made me happy. Once again, Aiwass blew me away.
I was thrilled when Blake Carrera (the man behind Aiwass), reached out after sending me his single “Man As God” in March. The track explored a wide range of sounds and feels. The overall outcome felt eerie and almost inhuman; simultaneously, it had a lot of groove. I was very excited to see Aiwass branch out and complete the “story.”
As he described to me “His Name Was Aiwass” follows a timeline. “There is an actual order to them that comes from general themes, whether that’s in the music or the lyrics,” Carrera wrote. With tracks “Aphrodite” and “Mythos” the bride is complete feeding to the Aiwass experience. I have found that either one of two things can happen when an artist creates an album. One, they strive for length, every song is strong and engaging on its own. They tend to tell individual stories having little build-up, but have powerful sounds and feels. And two (in Aiwass’s instance) each track is building to one bigger picture. Like a novel of some sort.
“I’ve been releasing singles for a couple of months now and at a certain point, you just start to want to do something a little bigger. While I have a full-length album coming out at the end of the summer/beginning of fall, the time was right for an EP,” Carrera explained. More inspiration to put out an EP was when 666MrDoom (a significant figure in the doom/stoner scene) offered to post an EP by Aiwass to his Youtube channel. The video just dropped, check it out here:
Watch “His Name Was Aiwass” on Youtube
Carrera further explained, “Despite the fact that the opportunity to put out the EP came about, it was time to show how these songs should be listened to.”
The name of the EP came from a book written by Colin Wilson, called Aleister Crowley. “There was a really simple sentence, ‘His name was Aiwass,’ and both myself and my girlfriend were taken by the direct nature of it. I want my music to feel very direct.”
“His Name was Aiwass” begins with “Aphrodite” originally just a riff he loved so much that he ended up writing a full song about it. The riff is remarkably animated with loads of spunk and character. I immensely enjoy Carrera’s signature echo-y lyrics that almost add an eerie, doomy layer. Not to mention, the foot-stomping backbeat that he programmed. Again, his lyric writing is astounding, I feel it’s gotten harder and harder to find artists that have true meaning in their music. Aiwass is definitely one of the few artists who have that remarkable ability to wrap a whole world inside their music.
When speaking with Carrera he claimed that he thought the song was “funny” and “out of his comfort zone.” However, outside listening in, the song is extremely powerful. “It’s not my usual style lyrically. It uses framework of the Greek goddess Aphrodite to talk about the ecstasy of sex that comes from real, actual love and not just some one night stand.”
The second track, “Mythos,” is almost eleven minutes long, a song that Carrera calls a “long and winding journey.” He explained that the long, soft intro is symbolizing the “metamorphosis from mortality to immortality.” Each part of the song symbolizes different things.
“‘I will die in the mythos/I ill rot in your minds‘ is supposed to show that while you may achieve immortality – whatever that is and however metaphorical you want it to be – there’s still an element of fading away, of not being immortal. And, from the bipolar point of view, any manic episode is going to lead to a depressive one as well. The heaviest elements to it are supposed to be almost like breaking out of your skeleton and your skin; the really light section is supposed to be about god-like awakening and the solos are supposed to be a mixture of ecstasy and anxiety.”
Most of the solos of the song have a heavy groove to them, similar to something you might hear from the blues. A really heavy sort of psychedelic groove that I was living for. I might have played those few solos a million times over. Especially the few he had during the end, they had loads of powerful lines that made you want to air-guitar along with it.
Carrera and I were talking a bit about blues and how it’s both created rock and influenced him as an artist. “I think more people need to credit the people that created this shit. I grew up on the blues and I wouldn’t be where I am without that influence,” he wrote. And that shows through a lot during the solos of “Mythos.” The final track is “Man As God” which was released back in March. You can check out my thoughts on the single here.
“His Name Was Aiwass” is 22 minutes of brilliance, filled with smart vocals, guitar-driven sounds, and a very doomy feel.
