THERE'S A KIND OF PRIDE you can take when one of your favorite bands does well. It's the same pride as when your little brother gets his first girlfriend, or when your sister is accepted on a team or into a school, or gets married to an awesome guy. The sideline, vicarious pride in an outside party recognizing what you've known all along—that this person is good and worthy and deserving of big things.

Now that Danava's signed to Kemado Records and people outside of Portland are talking them up, it's a good feeling. Not that national success should be a measure of greatness, but this is getting beyond the point. Which is just this: Danava are great, and I have earnest faith that their full-length is going to be a whopping fucker full of distorted fuzz-bomb guitar, mystic peyote screams, and deep and heavy experimentation.

Danava's four-song EP is like a 28-minute videogame from the '80s about riding around on your BMX trying to score weed. It's a psych-metal burnout of tangled-up song dynamics, epic prog-rock builds, and spaceship noise. Live, it's the kind of show where you stand there, fists clenched at your sides, gritting your teeth, almost too overwhelmed and into it to dance when—WHAM—suddenly Dusty Sparkles' singing, "So why do they hide, so why do they hide, so why do they hide" over again and again and its mantric tension is making you woozy and you throw yourself into the crowd and start smashing into people and tossing your arms all around and spinning in crazy circles and—then and there—a little drunk, a little dizzy, you fall to the club floor and watch the lights flash above you and you're there. You're in a Danava song. Your life is beautiful.