The supergroup: a coming together of great minds, or a doomed attempt at combining cred to vent unused song ideas and redirect cashflow? Depending on who makes up your all-star project, a supergroup can go on to become one of your most important outlets as an artist. And given that the new band 3rd Secret counts Nirvana‘s Krist Novoselic, Soundgarden‘s Kim Thayil, and Pearl Jam‘s Matt Cameron among its ranks, one wonders if it has the potential to become a big deal for all involved.
Rounding out the roster of 3rd Secret are Giants In The Trees vocalists Jennifer Johnson and Jillian Raye and guitarist Jon “Bubba” Dupree, formerly of Void. The band have quietly released their self-titled album, which you can hear below, and have launched a website that basically looks like an Angelfire page.
The record immediately makes us think of Canadian occult doom crew Blood Ceremony for some reason. Maybe it’s Johnson and Raye’s vocals, or the way the band swing between jangling acoustic stuff and syrupy guitar heaviness. The big difference is that 3rd Secret replace Blood Ceremony’s stiff autumn breeze with a hot desert wind. It feels like good music to drive through the wasteland of mid-California to. Soft-pack smokes are involved, locals are tickled if disgusted. But now we gotta wonder, as we write about it, is this the album everyone’s listening to at the beginning of the horror movie? Because the kind of vibe I’m describing is usually that of people in a movie who don’t know they’re going to take a throwing axe to the T-zone later on. So maybe this is murder music after all.
You can stream the record below. Whether 3rd Secret morphs into the single most important rock act of the next year, or whether we get stoned to this album on 4/20 and then kind of forget about it, well, that remains to be seen (but for the record, those are the only two options).