Everyone has a fantasy world, sometimes far from the reality because of all the hardships that one experiences in real life on a daily basis. That's where art helps you to take a trip to the fantasy world and stay as long as you would want and indulge in ecstasy. With a musical genre like Stoner Metal, psychedelic fantasy is a term more used and preached than probably anywhere else in art or science.  Icelandic Stoner legends THE VINTAGE CARAVAN released their 3^rd full length "Arrival" this May 15^th and I have to say, they do exactly what's expected of them. Take a ride on THE VINTAGE CARAVAN.

The journey on "Last Day of Light" starts from forest full of colorful flowers and trees and gets you started in your psychedelic journey. Like as is with the typical sound of the band, the songs are fast paced in the middle and on the slower side in the beginning and in the end, with clean structured regular tempo changes keeping things interested, good old school psychedelic, bluesy classic rock sound, managing it to sound heavy enough for the metalhead in me. The songs are so catchy that after listening to the album about half a dozen times, now I can recite the track list in the order without looking, almost! The riffs and songwriting structure in many songs, like "Monolith" is impeccable. The album goes into a bit of doomy mode with "Eclipsed", which is beautifully placed in the album. And then there are fuzz driven trippy songs like "Shaken Beliefs", "Sandwalker" and "Crazy Horses", which are more like party songs of the album. "Carousel" can easily be a soundtrack for the next Bond movie. Predictably, the album ends with an 8 min epic song in "Winter Queen", offering all that was expected and more, though sadly nothing stands out.

Though Stoner Metal has been flooded with new records every fortnight these days, few can match up to the variety and substance put out by these veteran stoners. It's not for nothing, was this album so much anticipated by the seasoned fans of the genre, and gladly the boys don't disappoint. With all the juice and variety, enough to quench the genre connoisseurs' thirst, "Arrival" offers a trip worthy of the listeners' time. Where is my weed and bong?<