I can tell you another thing: there's not a damned note on this album that smacks of Pro Tools meddling or any form of digital intervention at all. Dead Man recapture the analog warmth of the post-Woodstock corpus masterfully, weaving a crack rhythm section into the twisted DNA of the "we'll try anything with strings at least once" acoustic fetishism of the lead instruments in a dynamic, never boring melange of tripped out bliss. There's a refreshing lack of busyness in the production which is rare with today's penchant for trying to squeeze every spare inch of space out of however many tracks a band can afford to record on.

After playing it pretty straight with their dusty psych pop on side one, "The Wheel" takes things in a darker, musically progressive direction, sounding vaguely like acoustic early Sabbath -- the closest this ever gets to 'metal' -- but in truth closer to Jethro Tull, who we learned had nothing to do with the genre as far back as the 1988 Grammy awards. "Rest in Peace" keeps up the progressive inclination, but still sounds more like an _Astral Weeks_ outtake than anything Blue Cheer or Coven would have dabbled in, at least for the majority of the track. The instrumental breakdown about one third of the way through this song is worth the entire price of most albums released so far this year, and the last third of the song following that breakdown at least approaches Witchcraft levels of doom-like menace, ascending into a tribal maelstrom of shamanistic energy. I've been kicking myself for putting off the review of the Witchcraft _Alchemist_ album until it was past its sell by date, but I feel pretty fucking great about recommending _Euphoria_ as one of the unheralded godlike releases of 2008.