Album Review: Eldorado – Babylonia Haze

There’s a vintage quality to much of the rock n’ roll music that Eldorado peddle. The Madrid quartet are bluesy enough to draw comparison to bands like Thin Lizzy, Whitesnake and Led Zep, but its their groove, moxy and hep that mark out their true calling as Deep Purple’s sons. Babylonia Haze, their third album in English (their remaining back catalogue consists of companion Spanish releases), has a tendency to slip into formulas but the heart of the piece beats strong, hard and true.

The instrumentation is riddled with strong, warm tones and kitsch touches. The harmonic warbling keys of a ramped-up Hammond crash all over tracks like “Be Satisfied” and “Flowers Of Envy”, whilst the jingoistic acoustic guitar, clean licks and fluted riff of “Resurrection Song” make all three a bit too marmite for their own good. When these affectations drop back into the mix a little more, the power rock, hooks and licks of tracks like “You Don’t Wanna Need Her” and “Mad Woman” should see you back onside.

There’s also the stone cold groove of “Karma Generator” to lap up. It’s a track that sticks you back out in the slow lane, arm hanging out your window, head gently bobbing along. And when they pull back on the throttle, the honest, often explosive, balladry of “Goodbye And Carry On” and “Moon Girl” get you in the gut with the lyricism extracting deep emotion. The gorgeous, folk-fuelled “Breath The Night” goes one step further piling lilting violin on top of gently-strummed acoustic guitar. It’s proof of just how far the band are willing to bend to the will of their music.

The album does kind of go out with a whimper, and the whole lacks staying power, but there are enough sweet melodies and softly burnished structures to strike a chord with fans. Quite why Eldorado haven’t achieved wider recognition is a surprise, because when they hit their stride they rock like the veritable bastard.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2015/02/eldorado-babylonia-haze-sr/

Album Review: Purplehaze Ensemble – S/T

What’s in a name? Take PurpleHaze Ensemble’s moniker for instance. You’d imagine this Polish quartet to be a Jimi Hendrix covers band who, before each gig, spun a coin to see which band member would get to set fire to his guitar that night. Either that or to be a room full of potheads trading heavy-lidded musings on why Weetabix tastes “like sandpaper, ma-a-a-n”. Of course, they are actually a lot more interesting than the former and a hell of a lot more compos mentis than the latter.

Interestingly, they seem to sit at the centre of a musical crossroads, where the x-axis of grunge and stoner hits the y-axis of progressive metal and ambient rock. One minute they rage like Down, with vocalist Macias screeching like Phil Anselmo would after necking a bottle of bleach, the next they are conjuring up the head-down grunge of a Soundgarden or an Alice In Chains. Head deeper into the disc and you’ll discover that they are even capable of sucking up the progressive, experimental nectar from bands like Tool or Palms.

Starting out as just plain old PurpleHaze, a band focused on dispensing a solid dose of stoner rock, they recently switched drummers and employed synth player, Bemben, who was able to add a new dimension to their music by integrating an atmospheric layer of keys and samples underneath.

Interestingly by paying homage to the “old ways” of recording, they whipped this version up in one-take at at Red Shift Studio in Cracow. Only the vocals and synths were added afterwards – it has certainly made for an album with a vital energy and an almost edgy quality to it. On the downside, that mix has produced rough patches where the instruments don’t quite marry together. In particular, the harsh tones of the guitar leap out at the listener when the rest of the band is raging, but happily it comes back into its own when the power levels drop and the waves calm.

The dissonant fizz of the driving opener “Siren’s Song” is certainly a nasty wake-up slap with Macias at full roar and firing out crunch and sludge in equal measure. The oddly-rambling nature of “Haunt The Freak” instead finds an echoing, psychedelic series of Bombay Monkey-esque samples to lounge in before the dial is cack-handedly wound up and our first taste of their grunge leanings hove into view.

By “Could I” (a nod to Alice In Chains’ “Would I”, perhaps?) they’ve settled down into the session and the track’s natural structure gives us a true taste of their innate knack for songwriting. A gentle build with warping synth soon breaks into a stone-cold groove. Here, Macias uses the rhythmic swagger to impart a chilled blue tone into his vocal. Serving him well, he craftily weaves it around the chords in patterns, throwing neat lyrical twin hooks into the verses – “Spiders on my face / Snakes inside my face”. Running at nearly eight minutes in length, you still wouldn’t say it overstays its welcome.

Ramping up the atmospherics, “Kickin’ Curbs With A Thin Stick” and “Cross” offer up sub-level bass and the warping environs of Deftones-esque lush-to-crush experimentation. The former ends with a section where the strings drop out to leave just the synth roaming from the left ear to the right like a lost bee buzzing around inside our skulls. One to avoid is the mathy “Lie Is The Answer” which punches low as the vocalist trades restraint for over-commitment to the cause. Resplendent at it’s heart, the remainder is just too loud and too loose to really make any impact.

The band’s willingness to trade between grit and power and colour-streaked, ambient washes means that there is never a dull moment at any point in this self-titled debut. Most certainly, there is room for manoeuvre and not everything meshes together quite as you’d expect it to, but there is more than enough quality within to warrant further investigation – there aren’t all that many albums out there with this much variety on display. PHE have certainly shown that they have the courage to push things to the next level and that bodes well for their future. With an extra layer of lacquer applied to the production next time out, they might just yet surprise us all. Now, whose turn is it with Jimi’s big box of matches?

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2014/02/purplehaze-ensemble-st-unquiet/

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