Thunderhead

California's Mammatus are named after the bulbous lobes that sometimes bulge from the underside of clouds. And their music is occasionally bulbous, and also lobular - it's loaded with splattery sonic excess, overblown wah, bowel-crushing riffs and massively reverbed vocals. They're like a freakish combination of Dead Meadow and Sleep.

Nicky's under there somewhere.



Mike does the twist.





Chris on bass ... you may notice a certain sartorial similarity among the cloudy ones.



Thundering drummer Aaron skipped the lumberjack shirt.



This picture sums up Mammatus pretty well, I'd say.



Cumulonimbular action!





"Next up, Acid Mothers Temple ... WEL-WEL-WEL-COME THEM-EM-EM!!!"



The whole lot!



Bass-grinding action!



And a bit of gentle tootling at the finale.



Listening to their first album again, I'm reminded of how much they sound like Santa Cruz's answer to Castor - no wonder those guys all dug each other.

• Show reminder: The Real Deal, Faty Maty & The Yellowbelts, The Dirty 30's perform at End Hits; Reily, Books on Books and Fire Heats Water (not, apparently, F!ghtF!ghtF!ght as I said earlier) play Zaphod's; The Rest, The Soiree and The Soft Disaster perform at the Black Sheep Inn; The Unionist Ministers, The Just Barelys and B.A. Johnston perform at Mavericks.

This is your mind, on

I own about three dozen albums by Acid Mothers Temple and its multitude of offshoots. You don't have to be Einstein to guess that last night I was at Babylon, watching three brain-blistering sets from local greats Castor (putting on the finest show that I've yet witnessed from them), fab California psych heavyweights Mammatus (you may recall me praising their debut a while back) and of course, the masters of acid rock destruction, Acid Mothers Temple.

Castor, or at least Will and Dave, plus a few youngsters.



Mammatus. Hair, lumberjack shirts, distortion, they have it all!



Acid Mothers Temple. Oh, so fine.



In case you're wondering, Kawabata has just spied a new way to torture his guitar. More pictures (I took far too many) shall appear in a while. I worked up quite a backlog, going to 14 shows in April.