“Halt”
by Sky Saxon and Dragonslayers?
2008 song
One of Sky Saxon’s last great songs was "Halt", recorded in 2008 and released on a 7″ single as well as an otherwise unrelated CD. Information about personnel on "Halt" is difficult to understand; like many Sky Saxon-related releases the details are vague even while the music is excellent.
The label of the 2009 7″ on the German label Moonshake credits "Halt" (which includes an exclamation mark here, so “Halt!”) to The Seeds. Writer credits are Saxon/Atomic – that is, Sky Saxon and Tom “Atomic” Azevedo, who was in Sky’s late-80s band Dragonslayers. The Moonshake label also says that “Halt!” was recorded in 2008 at Cristalland. (We can’t find any information about what “Cristalland” may have been. A studio? A town? A state of mind?)
Anyway, so far so good, but "Halt" had also been added as a “bonus track” to the 2008 CD Back To The Garden. The CD was a Sky Saxon/Michael Oak project, albeit credited to The Seeds. Michael Oak does not seem to be involved, however, with "Halt", which has a totally different sound and already had a guitarist; presumably Atomic played on his own song. The confusing part is that in the CD booklet "Halt" is credited to “Sky Sunlight and Firewall”, i.e., Sky’s 1980s band before Dragonslayers.
Given Atomic’s co-authorship we believe (well, we wildly guess) that "Halt" was recorded in 2008 with Tom “Atomic” Azevedo and other unknown musicians, and that in resurrecting at least part of the Dragonslayers band in 2008 someone got confused and called it Firewall instead of Dragonslayers. Something like that. Perhaps. And what Michael Oak thought of someone (almost definitely Sky himself) shoehorning in this unrelated song (plus two others) as a bonus track on his so-called Seeds CD isn’t known.
Whatever the story, "Halt" is a great tune. A simple, low guitar crunch throbs in and out of step with a punchy acoustic guitar. In the midst of this gritty bedrock Sky wails about “blood for oil, what’s it really worth?”, recalling similar lyrics from the 1994 Fast Planet album Down The Nile. For five minutes the song goes around and around, the guitars chugging along and unnerving 1960s-ish organ notes shining, before it crumbles to the ground in a glorious heap. "Halt" is fantastic.
