Album Review: Asteroid – III

The “reactivation” of Swedish trio Asteroid, following a two year hiatus, has quickly led to the release of a seven-track third album rather unsurprisingly called III. Mostly we are dealing with the standard fayre of chunky swathes of fat fuzz over a groovy shuffling beat interspersed with thick, meaty riffs and walking solos. Like a slumbering Graveyard or Horisont, this is inspired retro; an evocative step back into the crackling bliss-buzz of 70s rock n’ roll.

“Pale Moon” has a recycling topline riff that buzzes about like a bee trapped in a bottle. It’s a total earworm but, by the third run-through, not in a good way. It’s a blessed relief when its steady disintegration into white noise is finally complete. “Last Days” swings a little more; a loose-limbed slice of Americana with a sweet, folky hue.

Robin Hirse’s emotive vocal wraps itself lazily around the rhythmic backline drawing you temptingly into each track. His lyrics are often dark – “Death will come, he always does / for each and every one of us” – complementing the melancholic tones that lurk within the music. For “‘Til Dawn” he gnarls up his delivery to match the bass-boogie and old-school riffery. For “Wolf & Snake” he bristles as his vocal drops in the mix and takes on a powerful, cracking quality to it. Solid, intense and heady at every turn, the groove makes this a sure-fire stand-out.

With the tracks sliding off the bat, chilled, smooth and easy. it’s a bit of a shock when “Them Calling” hits. Suddenly the music gets urgent, driven with menacing mantras and demonic choral chanting. Warnings such as “Like the pain of a rusty chain around your neck / I’ll make damned sure that you never will forget” quickly make you realise we have strayed from the true path. Rather brilliantly, the metallic tang of steel invades the chords and the distortion and overdrive begin to shatter our repose.

III is a cracking little step back in time with a nice twist in the tail. It’s sadly a tad short at 35 minutes and besides a couple of tracks it fails to bring anything especially new to the table. Having said that it’s spectacularly solid and funnily enough makes for a great driving album.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2016/11/asteroid-iii-fuzzorama/

Album Review: The Golden Grass – S/T

The Golden Grass are all about kicking back in the summer sun and letting their combination of blissed-out blues and warbling psych rock gently fold in around you. If their moniker didn’t give you a heads-up, most certainly the artwork on their debut album, a beautifully coloured piece by Niko Potocniak (founder of space rockers Seven That Spells), should do. Hailing from Brooklyn, NY, the band combine the sultry, sparse qualities of 60s groovers like The Move and The Animals with 70s boogie bands such as Cactus and Steely Dan. With added retro psychedelic soundscaping, the combination produces a rhythmic drive and tonal quality not unlike the funkier, trippier side of contemporary stylists like those of Danava and Horisont.

Most certainly it is Joe Noval’s bold electric bass that provides the solid framework allowing Michael Rafalwich’s wacky use of sustain and distortion to colour the picture with oodles of fuzz and echo. Fleshing it all out, the laid-back vocal harmonies are a case of steady-as-she-goes. Lyrically, there’s plenty of reassuring repetition allowing it all to stick in the mind. Hooked throughout, the wordplay and riffs will have you humming and singing in the bath long after the last note has faded.

The wildly theatrical psychedelic intro of “Please Man” quickly kicks into a head-bobbing verse. There’s a sweet, shuffling middle-eight, a dropout into chilled-out half-time and a switch into yet another echoing backdrop of cosmic wash. On the flipside, “Stuck On A Mountain” is more straight-up. It has fistfuls of smooth harmonics and an enigmatic pinged, top-end bassline that gets you deep in the gut. The rhythm jinks and jives always adding flavour. “One More Time” and “Sugar N’ Spice” both have lashings of soft-bellied guitar buzz and a harder, bluesier edge that both evoke plenty of Lynyrd Skynyrd. The groove and blatant funk kick on the latter makes it well worth the extended running time.

The album’s balance rocks a little with the over-indulgent “Wheels”.  At 13 minutes, it does account for almost half the album, so its choppy nature is somewhat concerning. Opening and closing as a fine piece of music to stick in your car when you’re breezing down country roads, the groove suddenly goes missing in the middle. Whether the plethora of warp effect guitar solos and disconnected drum showboating can really warrant repeated listens is debatable. At one point the track implodes, becoming little more than a series of disturbing whale sounds. Surely, this isn’t just an attempt to stretch an EP into an LP, is it? What does stand out is the walking bass and passionate jamming.

The Golden Grass’ crowning glory, of course, is that seemingly effortless, lush groove that they generate. Be it a field of flowers or the warm sands of a tropical beach that you imagine running through your fingers as you listen, the very fact that they take you drifting along with them proves that they are pushing all the right buttons. So hop on board… you really won’t regret it.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2014/05/the-golden-grass-st-svart-records/

Album Review: Horisont – Second Assault

Somewhere along the 250km of roadside that connects the Swedish cities of Örebro and Gothenburg, they must have discovered some manic tear in the space-time continuum. It’s just one theory to make sense of the two cities’ rapidly-expanding retro scene. Combined, they are able to boast an array of hirsute bands like Witchcraft, Graveyard, Burning Saviours and Horisont – the subject of this review. Each of those are successfully selling their own individual recipes to the same flashback-inducing space-cake. The crazy, tie-dye-wearing fans that are mopping it up can be found swinging their flares like it’s the Seventies all over again.

Horisont’s biography describes their sound as being “heavily influenced by 1970s hard rock groups like Black Sabbath, UFO, Thin Lizzy and Scorpions”; indeed a mouthful, which their wonderfully self-deprecating Facebook page sums up for us as “New Wave Of Swedish Old Man’s Rock”.

As you delve through Second Assault, their sophomore album, you’ll certainly pick up plenty of the aforementioned influences as well as some that they don’t acknowledge. On the magnificent “Crusaders Of Death” you’ll get a big hit of laid-back blues, echoing the shuffle of bands like King Crimson and Wishbone Ash, whilst the very first spin of the opener “Time Warrior”, had me jumping to the conclusion that they’d merely reworked Deep Purple’s “Speed King”. Most certainly, the band’s mark is branded deep onto its surface.

With so many different influences running side by side, the songwriting is a bit of a rocky road. There are clearly some tracks that hit you harder than others. The hearty groove on “Watch Them Die” grabs you by the nuts, but the title-track is a little too dull and the chaotic structure of “Spirit” merely leaves you a bit dazed and confused. At different moments my nostrils burned with pungent whiffs of Uriah Heep’s prog, the sheer power that lurks within Nazareth and even some hints of early-Whitesnake thrown in for good measure.

Axel Söderberg’s vocals are naggingly high-pitched and urgent and take some getting used to. The production keeps them crisp and crunchy so that they stand shoulder to shoulder with the scuffed, pitching riffs and tight, wild leads of guitarists Charlie Van Loo and Kristofer Möller. Sadly, it’s partly this abrasive clarity of sound that ends up being the album’s Achilles heel. The tracks stab at you like insect stings, each taking their influence from a different source.

The multi-directional approach, with the guitar tone changing with each track, means there isn’t a stylistic grab that binds them all together (take the muffled connective padding that all Graveyard’s tracks seem to tote, as an example of a single-minded style that achieves this), so you’ll find it tough to attach yourself to the whole caboodle. There’s also the fact that the rhythm section is intermittently relegated in the mix by the howling vocal and strings. I, for one, certainly found myself preferring the softer, buzzed-out tracks where the waves of lead abate and the bass and drums pop back to the surface in the way that those little colored buoys do when the ocean becomes subdued.

It’s funny. There is one particular American retro band they remind me of very much and that’s Danava; another band who suffer from trying to take a little too much from everyone else to throw into the pot without offering enough of themselves. I expected to dig Second Assault a lot more than I did which, despite my misgivings, is by no means a bad album with one or two sweet, rumbling cruisers and incisive cuts but, sadly, Horisont’s bigger picture is a far blander prospect than the emotion-soaked class displayed by some of their rivals.

Also online @ The NewReview (with samples) =  http://thenewreview.net/reviews/horisont-second-assault