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Dead Otter – The Sentinel
Riot Season / Echodelick – 2025
Rock, Stoner, Space, Psych, Instrumental
Rated: ****
Realizing we slept on their No Sleep Till Kozfest release and weirded out too much over Bridge of Weird and thus actually only ever mentioned their first step on the road to glory called Pathfinder. Indeed, we only mentioned Dead Otter’s first release from 2016 on the HiVe. And as usual, we should be dragged through the streets, full of tar and feathers. Luckily, there’s a new album out called The Sentinel and we can make up for the lack of attention given to this wild and wonderful outfit…
An outfit that left us wanting for more studio material for some seven years. But now that Dead Otter has crashed back into our dimension, we can dispel all those rumors about them being disbanded, abducted or living off-grid, off-planet in some astral trailer park. But now they’re here, materialized, shooting star fire lasers out of guitars and stomping out energy through a warp drive rhythm section!
The Otternaut! Our cosmic, probably intoxicated explorer, has crashed onto a desert world, beneath the looming gaze of… The Sentinel! A colossal planetoid entity that could erase civilizations with a mere blink of its eyes. And that story is told with wormholes full of fuzz, swirling smoke, and planet shifting distortion. Just listen as Space Shadows opens the transmission as it was captured by a derelict space station. Eleven minutes of shimmering cosmic mirage, slowly drifting, meditative and with a definite touch of sixties psychedelics. Your consciousness will slip its moorings, time will warp and as a numbers station crackles into existence like some weird prank call, you cannot help but ask yourself: did Dead Otter find a way to hack reality with music?
They continue kicking the door into deep space. Dual guitars duel like cosmic gladiators high on some weird kind of de fermented moon cactus, while that rhythm section gallops loudly across dunes of irradiated sand. There are a lot of floating moments and sections where you could imagine yourself stuck, submerged in vat of liquid waiting for freezing or cloning. That’s when the shoegazing, atmospheric haze drifts in. And that’s when you just bubble along and hold on to hear what kind of release might be coming. Like the organ solo in Ibises for instance, which sounds like a cathedral exploding on a distant moon, ending with shattered petals of stained glass flying off into vacuum.
The eventual climax, the final confrontation, happens on the final and title track The Sentinel. A desert-psych showdown with the planet god! It’s like they’ve hit the cosmic nerve, with twin guitars blazing through a sandstorm, and rumbles deep beneath the riffs like tectonic anxiety. Sonic howling and wailing, as The Sentinel stands before them. This is it, the time to push their space rock powers to the absolute brink… And to shove them and the gigantic Sentinel, over the edge… Dead Otter knows where it is, they’ve been there and might actually be one of the very few to have come back… With stories to tell..
(Written by JK)
