It takes balls to let Purling Hiss get in your face - their records are a half-corroded, screaming roar of high-end guitars crushed together, obliterating vocals and drums with their singular assault. Well, if you’ve got balls, get ready to swing ‘em! With Water On Mars, Purling Hiss have broken out of the basement, run through the bedroom and are now loose, out in the streets, blasting one of the great guitar albums in the past couple minutes. Yes, Water On Mars, from the swirling sound of Purling Hiss – Drag City’s gonna let you have it, come March 19th, 2013!

Water On Mars is Purling Hiss’s first recording outside the fuzzy confines of Mike Polizze’s inner rock utopia, where the first three albums and EP were constructed in solitude with a home-recording setup. Over the past couple years, Polizze’s been working with a band and fine-tuning new songwriting ideas while playing shows all over the place. Now there is a center to the Hiss maelstrom, with Polizze’s guitars slugging, sizzling and spiraling their way around the rhythm throb, singing disaffected in shifts both aggro and slack (and around to the back) through the course of a song, with production highlighting the schiz by buffing the raw power into a streamlined blast. If that doesn’t rattle your caveman brain, nothing will! Purling Hiss have a deeply satisfying way of drawing from the red, white and blue wells of 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s rock to inform their own sound, giving things a retro ring while doing what they do in the Philadelphia of today – and no other time could apply, really. So bring your neanderthal face out to space, grab a glass, and prepare for a pour from Water On Mars, Purling Hiss’ first banger for Drag City, out in March!

The Austin, TX quartet known as The Young have kept a somewhat shadowy profile since their inception in 2007. With little regard for public reception, The Young opt for something far more experimental in nature. On the heels of a 2010 appearance on Matador’s ‘Casual Victim Pile’ Austin compilation, the band would record an astonishing debut full-length for Mexican Summer, that staked a claim for The Young being the-next-great-American-psychedelic-wonder.
Over the course of a year+ , a new record on Matador, sharing stages with the likes of Sic Alps, Kurt Vile, Pierced Arrows, Endless Boogie and other masters of modern rock guitar, it would not be an exaggeration to say their meticulous interplay has become both uncanny and unstoppable. The only thing quiet about this band is their confidence.