Eight years passes like nothing for Birds of Maya. Their fourth album kicks out the Philly jams with every bit as much fervour as their earlier releases - in fact, as it was recorded in 2014, it kind of is one of their earlier releases.

A long era of dull ringing and nothing else in our ears is over. Once again, winds of warm guitar and humid thunderheads of bass and toms rumble all around. With ‘Valdez’, Birds of Maya are back in flight. And like the first song title explicitly states, this latest is a soaring blast of riffers, rife with punk rock abandon, sludge, treble, distortion, neck-throttling rock ‘n’ roll solos, pummelling drums and bass and half-shouted/half-gargled vocals, all of it half on and half off the mic.

‘Valdez’ was recorded in 2014 at Black Dirt Studios in otherstate New York. After a Purling Hiss session there, Birds of Maya got a bunch of tunes they liked into shape - that is, different shapes on different days. But nice shapes. Once they got to the studio, they loaded in and set up, curious to see how they felt playing in a different room. Pretty good as it turned out - running through the songs that first night, they accidentally recorded the whole album. Then they finished up the next day, mostly. Trading the crushed harmonics of their basement tapes for studio-grade mics, overdubs in the mix and only slightly lessbruised harmonics, their roiling essence not only survives but thrives, non-stop, on ‘Valdez’, stuttering, screaming and stomping through six circuitous numbers.

At the time this was recorded, Birds of Maya were standing on the other side of ten years kicking around town, suddenly far away from the primordial ooze they’d flopped forth from. The streets where all this had happened on were changing, with new money rolling in, but they were the same old Birds, content with their libations and ear-splitting variations on old favourite Stooges chords. The cover art of Valdez is a couple of images from those days, glimpses at the old grass roots before they were ripped up by developers to build condos. But nothing ever really goes away. ‘Valdez’ is a totem of the wildness that refuses be tamed.

TRACK LISTING

High Fly
BFIOU?
Busted Room
Recessinater
Front Street
Please Come In

Agitated is super chuffed to be handling the CD reissue of this monster... Over the past few months and years, dropouts all over the world have been nodding out to the amped up riffing of PURLING HISS & the economical chuga- lug zen of SPACIN'. But only the most committed seekers have been privy to the roaring big bang that started it all: BIRDS OF MAYA.

They're a locked-in dynamo that gets real, real gone at the strike of the first note that needs to be seen to be believed. But as the Birds rarely (very, very rarely) perform outside of their North Philadelphia neighborhood, Ready To Howl will have to suffice. Formed in 2002, BIRDS OF MAYA is the finest meat n' potatoes neanderthal rock group operating in the world today, and they're undoubtedly the outfit most committed to creating throbbing, thoroughly relentless, blues-based hard rock.

On Ready To Howl, astute listeners will note nods to the fried power-rock of Split-era Groundhogs or the relentless garage mayhem of High Rise recorded under claustrophobic sub-Funhouse decadence. Anyone with ears will hear fried-Hendrixisms all over this thing. It was the most ambitious TestosterTunes release to date: a 3-song, double-LP by the three men of Philadelphia's BIRDS OF MAYA. Called Ready To Howl and it's the soundtrack to an upcoming feature length film of the same name. Ready To Howl, the film, deals with one dude's struggles in-and outside of polite society.

According to the producer, "the order of events is something like... getting off of work, partying, a parking lot bottle fight with a marine, driving drunk, the purchase of a deadly snake for purposes of revenge, hitchhiking, off road driving, car accident, the folly of vindictiveness, and finally a physical and metaphorical ascent to the highest point of the mountain." The soundtrack follows the same line, with album sides tracking Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

The CD version features the 3 tracks of the 2LP in unedited for vinyl length, no splits in the songs for you to get up and turn the record over...turn it UP!!!