Former band mate Josh Homme is more famous, but Brant Bjork is happy alone, writes Scott Kara
KEY POINTS:
Talking to Brant Bjork is all about "the trip", man - as in the trip his music takes you on.
As the drummer of desert rock band Kyuss, Bjork and the band's other main player, Josh Homme, who went on to bigger and more popular things with Queens of the Stone Age, came up with a heavy and trippy psychedelic sound dubbed "stoner rock".
Although, because these guys were from Palm Desert, California, the term desert rock is just as apt.
"I don't know where the sound comes from," says Bjork on the phone from his new home in Venice, California. "It's either really deep, just on the surface, or maybe both," he laughs.
"Growing up, out in the desert, in the 80s, with punk rock and analogue music, records and skateboarding, and freaking out and goofing off, and taking whatever and jamming - I'm just a product of my environment, that's all."
Perhaps Bjork's crowning achievement in Kyuss was writing the grinding and guttural dirge anthem Green Machine, off the band's classic 1992 album, Blues For the Red Sun.
And much of Bjork's solo music since leaving Kyuss in the mid-90s has retained the trippy jam style of his old band, only with a more bluesy rather than metal mood.
He and his band the Bros play the Transmission Room in Auckland tonight and it's his first visit here since 1999 when he was drumming for fellow stoner rockers Fu Manchu.
While Bjork's solo material has its fair share of catchy hooks, like the excellent Kiss Away off 2005's Saved By Magic, much of it also has a similar trance-inducing effect as African desert rock bands like Tinariwen and Etran Finatawa. He's also a fan of early 70s Nigerian music and Jamaican dub and reggae.
"I just think whether you're on an island in Jamaica or in Nigeria, or out in Palm Desert where we grew up, you've got lots of youthful energy but it's just like time kind of stands still, so you just take your time.
"If you've got 50 people drinking beers out in the desert there's no need to blast out singles, it's not like a frat party where you're playing everyone's favourite hits, everyone's just laidback and they just want to hear music and they don't care about the hooks. They just want to groove.
"That was a big part of [the] desert scene - we all got into punk rock because you could do your own thing in your own way, but we just didn't want to keep blowing out these punk songs. We wanted to keep playing and it evolved and where the song was meant to end we'd just keep playing because there was no reason to stop," he laughs.
And what does he make of the Kyuss legacy these days - one that's arguably bigger now than it was back in the day?
"With the exception of us in the band there were very few people round back then who knew how great a band it was in terms of it just being a supernatural thing. We knew it was something special and like a lot of things you just don't know how long it's going to last. But it's pretty interesting that it's lived up to the test of time."
While you're not likely to hear any Kyuss at his show tonight, you'll get taken on a trip.
"It's not like Kyuss is sacred ground, but I want to concentrate on the music I do as a solo artist. Kyuss was a special thing for a lot of reasons and not all those apply to what I do today, so I just kind of leave it alone."
LOWDOWN
Who: Brant Bjork
What: Multi-instrumentalist and formerly of Kyuss and Fu Manchu
Key albums: Kyuss - Blues For the Red Sun (1992); Brant Bjork and the Bros - Saved By Magic (2005); Brant Bjork - Punk Rock Guilt (2008)
Where & when: Transmission Room, Auckland, tonight
