Live: Earthless and The Heavy Company – Piere’s – Ft. Wayne, IN – Sept. 13, 2022

It was the end of the first leg of Earthless‘ U.S. tour, and it turned out to be guitarist Isaiah Mitchell‘s birthday. It also turned out to be another stunning performance by them.

My friend and I go to the venue too late to see the first opening band, Ancient Days, but we did catch The Heavy Company (otherwise known as THC) play a blues-infused rock set that impressed the enthusiastic crowd.

The Heavy Company

Earthless played for a little over an hour, and that set was three songs. If you’re new to Earthless, you need to know that two of those songs were over twenty minutes long, and the third was nearly fifteen minutes long. They don’t skimp anything during a show. They give all every time. I yelled, “I can’t feel my face.” after the end of the second track.

L-R: Isaiah Mitchell, Mario Rubalcaba, Mike Eginton

It’s difficult to describe how much heavy power they unleash. I was reminded during their performance of an analogy my wife heard once about a full jar. Take a large, earthenware jar and fill it with rocks. Is the jar full? No. It may seem like it is, but you could fill the space between the rocks with water. Full now? No, because you could slowly add sand to the jar to absorb the water and take up all the remaining space. Now the jar is so heavy you’d need Hulk-like strength to lift it.

Now change the venue to a music venue that holds about 200 people and change the rocks to Isaiah Mitchell’s bass riffs, the water to Mario Rubalcaba’s drum fills, and the sand to Mike Eginton’s heavy bass riffs and you’ll get the idea.

Keep your mind open.

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Rewind Review: Earthless – Live in Guadalest (2013)

Back in 2009, psych / kraut-rock trio Earthless (Mike Eginton – bass, Isaiah Mitchell – guitar, and Mario Rubalcaba – drums) played a music festival in Guadalest, Spain. Thankfully for all of us, Live in Guadalest was recorded and released in 2013 as a special item at the band’s merch table during an Australian tour and also made available as a digital download for those of us who missed out on the few physical copies produced.

The set is “only” two songs, but the shortest one is twenty-two minutes and fourteen seconds long. That’s the second track, “Godspeed.” The first, “From the Ages,” is over half an hour and tears out of the gate like an Arabian race horse with black coffee in its veins. It turns into a meditative jam around the eleven-minute mark. The song is cruising along a dark highway by minute-fifteen, and your mind is blown eight minutes later when they break the song down yet again.

“Godspeed” melts whatever traces of your brain are left from the previous track. It starts mellow enough, but soon Rubalcaba is hammering away at his kit with renewed vigor and Eginton and Mitchell put the pedal to the metal. Eginton’s bass is particularly funky on this version of “Godspeed,” and Mitchell seems to be playing two guitars at once. The breakdown at the seventeen-minute mark is outstanding and the fade out leaves you breathless.

This is a good place to start if you’ve never seen Earthless live. It will make you want to catch them as soon as possible, as you should. You won’t regret it.

Keep your mind open.

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