Convoys, Caravans, And Lowriders The hypnotic doom rock featured on Lowrider's debut for Meteor City Records, Ode to Io, is of the sort that commands the attention with its hulking, fuzz-ridden guitar riffs and passionately unrefined vocals. The cerebral cortex becomes a submissive passenger aboard this hallucinorockic journey through sweltering desert rock riffs and colorful jam passages. Thick grooves and otherworldly vocals coalesce around a distinctive rhythmic bounce that recalls Kyuss, and immediately stakes out album opener "Caravan" as a prime track. Lowrider reaches its zenith on the ultra-heavy third track, "Convoy V," which hammers out an anthemic chorus ever-struggling to disentangle itself from the weighty guitar riffs, which are so huge that they have their own gravitational pull that sucks the listener into a druggy haze of overheating heaviness and heightened emotion. When questioned as to the ideal setting or state of mind for absorbing the raw sonic sludge rock that is Ode to Io, bassist and vocalist Peder Bergstrand places Lowrider in context: "Without being too arty-farty, I'd say that I consider us to be a band that you listen to when you're really into the whole deal of listening to music. The perfect setting for listening to Lowrider is: first, get drunk at some party listening to Grand Funk and Humble Pie and stuff, and then, when you start getting a bit drowsy, you sneak into some room, lay down on a bed and listen to Ode to Io loud as hell in headphones, the whole album in one sitting. "I mean," continues Peder, "we've begun to do more right-on, straight rock tunes now also, but we're still a band that does music that you have to put some effort into listening to, to really hear all of the stuff that's in there. We put a lot of soul into our music, and I'm really into getting all the small, cool details in there." So, when recording Ode to Io, did the band have a mental image of how the album as a whole would flow, or were the songs recorded first and then arranged in a sequence? "A little of both really," replies Peder. "We decided early on that ‘Sun Devil' should fade into ‘Anchor,' and that ‘Caravan' should be the first song, and that ‘Ode to Io' should finish it all off with its instrumental smoothness. But then we improvised pretty much from there. So we had a concept, and just filled in the blanks." As Lowrider's sound might attest to, some amount of room was allowed for improvisation and spontaneity while recording, although this was limited to appropriate places. "To be completely honest," confesses Peder, "the others in Lowrider hadn't heard the last track, ‘Ode to Io,' before entering the studio. So that one was pretty much a big improvisation - as you might feel from listening to it - with a vibe that is pretty much free, flowing, fat rock. We rehearse most of the tracks until we consider them finished, and record them. We have been known to change a lot of stuff in the actual recording process, or just add cool stuff that we come up with [while recording]." Commenting on Lowrider's philosophy for creating and recording music, Peder states that "it should never be too late to add something that you feel fits in there, or that there isn't room for improvisation. Without that freedom, we wouldn't be able to play music in the first place." Live, Peder describes Lowrider as "more direct," although he notes that "it's hard to get all the small things that you can add to an album in the live set. But in some ways the live environment can release things in the band that you don't get in the studio. Ola, for example, plays totally different live from his performance in the studio. He kicks more ass live, but makes less mistakes in the studio [laughs]." And the band also has its fair share of strange touring experiences. "When we did Denmark last year, a guy ran across the room and leaped into the drumkit and passed out for 20 minutes," recalls Peder, before bringing up "that time in Leipzig when a dog at the side of the stage wouldn't stop licking his balls [laughs]." The term stoner rock, which is commonly applied to bands of a similar ilk as Lowrider, is frequently a bone of contention among the involved artists and fans, fearing that the music might get overlooked or stereotyped by a media too eager to focus on the drug aspect. While Peder admits the need for "reference points" when communicating about music, he states that, "I hate the term stoner rock, mostly just because all it says is that the people who play and listen to that music are stoners, and a lot of us aren't. Hell, we could be drunk rock, or beer rock, or what ever," observes the singer/bassist. "Nowadays, the accepted term for heavy rock that isn't rap-metal seems to be stoner rock, just like every band who used a distortion box in 1992 was tagged as grunge. It's unavoidable, so I've really just stopped caring about it." Peder concludes with what is one of the better commentaries on the stoner rock tag: "First of all, we play rock. In what manner we fuck ourselves up is another matter."

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