Avid readers of the Broken Face should know how highly I rank the work of Virginian Pelt, so it?s with great excitement that I see two thirds of the current Pelt line-up appearing in a new (at least on record) ensemble. Spiral Joy Band is the combined efforts of Mike Gangloff, Mikel Dimmick and Karl Precoda (Last Days of May, The Dream Syndicate) and like one would imagine they conjure a pretty dark and fucked up drone racket that?s not too far off the Pelt experience. Well, that?s not entirely true but they do find their base in the same sort of ghostly, whirring metallic noises and bowed metals that the mothership from time to time examines more closely. Besides the ample use of gently struck metal percussion we get a myriad of barely distinguishable (and pronounceable) acoustic instruments such as Tibetan singing bowl, gong, sruti, bells, flute, esraj, tanpuram, shenai, tongue drum, dumbek and shakers. This is probably one of the reasons why there?s such a great sense of detail amid the random arrangements of drifting and screeching tones. 8/10 -- Mats Gustafsson (27 June, 2006)