Last Updated on August 23, 2022, 6:38 PM | Published: August 23, 2022
OKLAHOMA CITY (Free Press) — It’s almost unheard of to get a debut album from a band with as much confidence, competence, and swagger as OKC’s Sisteria showcases on their brand new, first-ever full-length, “Dark Matter.”
That’s likely due in large part to the collectively massive wealth of knowledge and experience that the album’s many players all share.
Plenty has already been written (particularly here on Free Press) about the live band’s eventual formation and performance prowess, but “Dark Matter” represents something very different. Composed and crafted as a sprawling, evolving studio experiment, the tracks morph through various different lineups and players with each musician across the record’s impressive roster bringing their own strengths and signatures to the shifting sonic environments of each song.
And at the center of it all, unflinchingly, are Katie Williams and Steve Boaz.
Though the musicians change throughout, each moment of the album’s 50 loaded minutes is anchored firmly in Williams’ songwriting and Boaz’s drumming and composition. It’s almost easy to imagine stripping each song down to nothing but its rhythm, lyrics, and vocal melodies – its sturdy, galvanized bones – and to hear the layered textures of guitars, keys, and studio ambiance as a kind of environmental development growing organically around and between those foundations.
In that way, this collection of crushing, mystical, psychedelic hard rock actually resembles the best of folk music.
Underneath the fuzzy, spitting guitars and the massive, decidedly “Deep Purple” organ textures that sometimes push this psych-rock soundscape toward outright metal, this is, at heart, a songwriter’s album. The music is there to support Williams’ lyricism and storytelling, never the other way around.
The songs here revisit plenty of the mainstay topics for psych-rock – space imagery, mysticism, pagan spirituality – but there is something surprisingly fresh and relevant about Williams’ delivery.
When she sings about witch burnings or rising from the dead, it’s never presented with the kind of stoner epiphany context of the average wizard-cosplaying prog-rocker. She’s not talking make-believe, but of the very real and very modern female experience.
The songs on “Dark Matter” aren’t just collections of psychedelia or magical buzzwords to evoke some grand, drug-fueled vision. Williams is spinning time-honored fantasy folk tales of cosmic defiance in the western wastelands, but recasting the archetypical calm, sneering, and enduringly male main character with an Earth-mother protagonist, confidently emotional and encouraging, but with the power and resolve of an encroaching thunderstorm.
If fantasy storytelling is about wish-fulfillment, then Williams is portraying the hero that she wishes for all women to be, in full command of her sexuality and uncompromising in her demand of respect.
And she delivers this message with a voice from Mount Olympus.
The easy thematic comparison would be to Stevie Nicks (and a “snow covered hill” reference in track “Om/Yes” makes that a bit more overt,) but the more apt equivalent would actually be Jefferson Airplane’s legendary Grace Slick. There’s a bit of weight and wild-eyed intensity behind Williams’ vocal delivery that matches the theatricality and power of Slick’s best moments. Her voice can lilt gently into a song just as easily as crashing into a chorus like a battering ram.
Though Williams is the central figure throughout, Boaz is the mad scientist behind the scenes (and behind the drums) conjuring the very landscape for Williams to command. These songs resist easy categorization, shifting from doom to folk-rock to southern-rock to the dark, building mystery of chaotic closer “Burial Ground,” but Boaz’s production creates a clear cohesion and an understandable musical language that never trips over itself.
There’s a fair bit of Black Sabbath and the modernist heavy touches of admitted influences All Them Witches and Black Mountain, but I still believe that the best comparison is to the experimental mid-period Led Zeppelin records. Like those landmark albums, “Dark Matter” opens its doors to elements of folk, country, and southern blues, all while retaining its hard rock heart and heavy hitting, metallic core.
It’s a testament to Boaz’s instincts that one could easily listen to the album in its entirety any number of times and never realize that the featured musicians change from track to track. His ability to identify the best players for each song’s needs is laser-focused, from now-permanent member Richie Tarver’s soaring, fuzzy leads to hometown Norman hero Mike Hosty’s guitar stylings to the atmospherics, textures, and foundational backing vocals of the band’s Swiss-army man secret weapon, Nathan Lofties. Each performer comes bearing their own stamp, but always in service of creating the bigger picture.
To say the least, it will be interesting to see how Sisteria evolves from here, especially as the core performing lineup has now been well-established and has tightened into the six-headed musical monster that blew the walls off of Ponyboy for the album release show on August 20th.
But even if the group solidifies into a more collaborative band dynamic over time, “Dark Matter” will forever stand as a document of the musical partnership of Williams and Boaz, and of their willingness to spend a few years exploring the darkness and the wilderness outside of their comfort zones.
Sisteria’s debut album “Dark Matter” is available now from Horton Records on all streaming services and at hortonrecords.bandcamp.com.
Follow Sisteria online at facebook.com/sisteriaband and @sisteriaband on Instagram.
Brett Fieldcamp has been covering arts, entertainment, news, housing, and culture in Oklahoma for nearly 15 years, writing for several local and state publications. He’s also a musician and songwriter and holds a certification as Specialist of Spirits from The Society of Wine Educators.
