Jeffrey Alexander + The Heavy Lidders 
Hooking the heady impulses straight to the veins, site mainstays Jeffrey Alexander + The Heavy Lidders return to curl the various factions of cosmic consciousness in on themselves. Born in the crucible of jam and set aloft with the best of their burnt seagrass seances, the new album finds the band more unbuttoned than New Earth Seed while picking through some of the same driftwood desires that drove Planet Lidders. The core four return, with Drew Gardner and Jesse Sheppard reprising their work on bass and guitar, though some space is carved out for the vibraphone explorations that have snuck into Elkhorn and Drew’s own works over the last few years. Scott Verrastro slips behind the kit once more, anchoring the band’s celestial voyages with a measured hand. They don’t travel alone, though, tagging in, as often, some help hammering out their vision. Sax this time comes from Tacuma Bradley, on the slow-dance smolder of “Calliope Wailer” and the singe of “Critical Massing,” while they tap in psych legend Christina Carter’s otherworldly voice (Charalambides) on “Tightroping” and the freeform album closer.
The band always plays nice with guests, and their willingness to collaborate comes as a welcome thread in each new work in their catalog. Contrary to the scorch of Jeff Tobias or the soulful injections by Isaiah Collier, Bradley does his best to stipple the surface of their psychedelia with something more languid and, in the spirit of the album’s title, liquid. Carter, for her part, launches the Lidders into some of their most meditative space yet, divining something ethereal through her voice without a single word. The band still nods occasionally towards the malleable clay edges of high plains indie in the vein of Meat Puppets in the band’s closest brushes with the cosmic, but this record leaves many of those early impulses at bay, opting instead for the allure of the kind of improv articulation they find in their live moments; Dead-acolytes at heart.
The band has moved in phases, fleshing out Alexander’s songs into a group environment on their debut, filtering the fray though a producer on New Earth Seed, and following the muse into the mire on quite a few others. Liquid Donnon falls neatly into the latter camp, a firelight trip into the upper atmosphere that dances where the smoke dares.