By Greg Pratt

The stoner metal community managed to get it together enough to mutter out a “Hell, yeah,” when West Virginia’s KARMA TO BURN got back together last year after a seven-year hiatus following the band’s excellent Almost Heathen disc (a fruitful hiatus, as Karma members took the time off to go play in Nebula and Speedealer). As it turns out, spinning the band’s latest, Appalachian Incantation (their fourth overall, and first for Napalm Records), it seems that not much has changed in the interim. The riffs are still massive, and massively enjoyable, the tunes still gallop along with tons of energy, and the vocals are soaring…

Wait, vocals? Well, two songs on this full-length do feature singing, but this time around it’s not label suits dictating the caterwauling, it’s just the band doing what they want to do.

“Simple,” says bassist Rich Mullins when asked why singing showed up on the album. “We like those songs. We wrote ‘Waiting On The Western World’ with Daniel Davies (YEAR LONG DISASTER, and son of THE KINKS’ Dave Davies) so it never did not have vocals. We thought it was a very strong song and put it on the record. The John Garcia (KYUSS) song (‘Two Times’) is very old and we finally felt we should release it.”

Simple as that. And why not have two songs with vocals on them to mix up what can be, admittedly, a difficult slog: a full-length of instrumental desert/stoner rock? Even with riffs as almighty as the ones Karma To Burn write, it’s nice to mix it up. And Mullins says this kind of vocal-related mixing-up could easily happen again on future albums.

“Absolutely,” he says. “We place no limits on what we’re capable of. To be honest, I agree there are many, many vocalists in many, many genres that are simply biding time holding attention spans until the next section of music. We like to think that we are not doing that with the vocals we added. For us, they add an extra dimension and melody to what we do.”

Going back in time a bit, although this band is probably completely exhausted of being asked this, oh well, that’s what we do: why decide to become an instrumental band in the first place? Mullins says it started because Karma To Burn got things going without finding a singer that suited the band; the shows were already booked, so what else are you gonna do?

“We intended to just tell ghost stories in between songs,” he chuckles. “It evolved naturally. It’s definitely rough going instrumental—we weren’t viewed by any music business entity as capable of making them money. It’s a difficult sell for them. Or at least so we’ve been told, by about 1,000 different music biz types.”

Mullins’ cynicism is understandable, considering the uphill battle that his band fights every day. But the tunes on the new disc will help both band dudes and band fans chill out a bit, again, those huge riffs bursting with potential pleasure, the songs wildly enjoyable, music biz types be damned. And about that new album, the vocals aren’t the only thing different on there, as the band has added a bit of new touches to keep everyone—but mainly themselves—interested.

“We feel it’s a very solid release,” says Mullins, who adds the band plan on touring “damn hard” for the album. “We’ve started a couple new veins that we want to entertain further and attempted a couple odd twists that, we feel, worked well. For instance, ‘41’ has a feedback bass solo that intertwines throughout the middle and end. That’s just a ‘for instance,’ and probably the instance mentioned because I play bass (laughs).”