Album Review: Holy Grove - Holy Grove

Formed in 2012, this release marks the eponymous debut album from the doom-friendly quartet from Portland, Oregon. Sounding like a mind-meld between the cauldron-staring Black Pyramid, the dynamic Blues Pills, and the fantasy riff-chucking of The Sword, Holy Grove’s self-titled debut focusses on pitching buzzing stoner into 70s doom riffs that glisten with Lovecraftian intent.

Opener “Death of Magic” swings a sackful of big hearty bass, ladles on the groove and rocks you from pillar to post. Throughout fuzz-driven guitar riffs pitch and yaw all around whilst Vidal’s softly echoing vocal floats above it all. Her determinedly heartfelt cries bear a striking similarity to the storming output from Acid King’s Lori S.

Further in, “Nix” pulls out some feisty hooks and chucks in more psychedelic noodling before dropping into a half-time cosmic crawl to end. The heartstone of the piece though is the one-two segued caress of the title-track and the addictive bluesy lines of “Huntress”. They bear emotion that grips and won’t let go – “Kneel down at the altar”, indeed.

The Sabbathian-influenced “Caravan” wraps itself around the classic riff of the aforementioned’s “Evil Woman” before the 9-minuter, “Hanged Man”, with its dark chanting and punishing, warped overdrive tips a hat to Saint Vitus and seals the deal.

They’ve clearly had a ball making this album; you can hear the glee in their riff worship. Their continued deference to the metal gods of times past works for them as it stands up on its own – a stonking creation. Yep, there’s nothing truly innovational here but it’s still a thoroughly joyful experience and they are deservedly going down a storm in the live arena.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2016/04/holy-grove-st-heavy-psych-sounds/

Album Review: Goatess – Goatess

With a cover reminiscent of something out of Hellboy, Goatess’ self-titled debut certainly stands out. Titled The Birth Of Pan it features what looks like an unborn faun in the womb; strangely beautiful and pretty hard to ignore. What lurks within is similarly tough to forget.

Stockholm’s Goatess set their stall out splitting their efforts between throwing out weighty Sabbathian doom and gloom, driving, sludge-packed rock and exploding, cosmic psychedelia that threatens true enlightenment. If you recognise the hauntingly melancholic, resonant vocal and are thinking it might be Ozzy Osbourne himself (“I never say die-e-e!”), you’d be understandably mistaken. It belongs to none other than cult vocalist Chritus Linderson (Lord Vicar, ex-Count Raven, ex-Saint Vitus). Originally named Weekend Beast, the band was born of Chritus and guitarist Niklas’ desire to play less-structured doom metal; something with atmosphere centred around their worship of the heavy riff.

Opener “Know Your Animal” turns out to be an excellent diversion from their stock material, coming through a lot cleaner and feistier than it’s mucky brethren. The overdrive does kick in for the chorus, but compared to the blues-soaked stomp of “Alpha Omega” it’s full of positivity and life. From here its a slow descent into the sludge pit where the Sleep-esque rotational, trance-inducing single-chord plod rules all. The 10-minute “King One” is the finest of these dissonant soul-suckers, finding numerous ways to re-ignite the joys in mastering the lengthy one-riff song. If the ear-to-ear phase doesn’t do it for you, it could be the game-changing dropout, the tweaks toward Soundgarden-like grunge, the trilling top-end or the heavy use of the drum fill, but most likely it’ll be the sum of those parts. Basically it’s got all the things that “Ripe” and “Oracle, Part 2″ haven’t.

Inside this network of repetitive bludgeoning, there lies the axis point of the album. It lurks in the middle of the startlingly experimental “Full Moon At Noon”. The dominant, forceful riffing and sudden crisp, loud breaks suddenly give way and the track collapses into swathes of mind-expanding experimentalism. It continues on through “Oracle, Part 1″ and the incredible “Tentacles Of Zen”. This 12-minute denouement features eye-opening sound clips from a scene from the 1976 BBC dramatisation of I, Claudius where Mnester (Nicholas Amer) theatrically suggests that Messalina (Sheila White) take part in a tournament of sex. His lascivious imagining of “copulation on a cosmic scale” provides the perfect introduction for the mesmeric sonic orgy that follows – be sure to have your bong at the ready for the magnificent section of tribal drums and ethnic strings.

Goatess’ constant shape-shifting, some might say unbalanced, sound is a feature that crops up quite a lot. Whether it is an effect they wanted during recording or is merely an unintentional post-production anomaly is unclear, but it certainly adds to the overall disorientating effect. Svart Records are building up quite a special roster of bands right now and these mind-bending Swedes have slotted in like a charm.

Also online @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2013/07/goatess-goatess-svart-records/

Album Review: The Graviators – Evil Deeds (Napalm Records)

Sweden’s trickle of 70′s revivalists is rapidily becoming a flood, as following fast in the footsteps of bands like Witchcraft, Graveyard and Burning Saviours come more worshippers like Horisont and, voilà, The Graviators. Described in their PR flyer as coming from “deep in the woods”, it is no surprise to hear their music sounding so angry, nay, feral; more-stripped down than several of their blues-loving forbears. If Graveyard were, say, the bleary-eyed bongheads of this expanding retro scene, then The Graviators would be the wide-awake tearaways spray-painting Pentagram and Black Sabbath symbols onto buildings.

Take the 2:43 of “Morning Star”. It’s a rip-roarin’ blazing rocker of a track, slicked with Johan Holm’s gnarly basslines, Martin Fairbanks’ thick, fuzz-covered riffing and Niklas Sjöberg’s scowling vocal that rises up and up, ending in a howling falsetto. At other times, during say “Feelin’ Low”, they seem impelled to explore the more Sabbathian realms of old school doom. They linger upon each note to turn the pace into a lollop. They reach a depth and breadth of undertow that begins to congeal around you leaving you mired (by the album’s end, naturally) in the Saint Vitus-worshipping sedentary plod that “The Infidel” becomes. It forms the quicksand that has secreted itself around your legs, slurping and burping all around.

Whilst there’s little new to be found in tracks like “A Different Moon” and “Häxagram”, there are other highlights to be found. Check out the form of “The Great Depression” with its rising-and-falling, walked riff and undercurrent of blues, and “Evil Deeds” which flits about whilst remaining leashed to it’s repeating chorus like a paranoid-afflicted, ADD-sufferer. Oh, and do keep an ear pinned back for the glorious little touches of Hammond organ and Wurlitzer piano (like those in the otherwise overwrought “Presence”) as supplied by Petrus Fredestad.

The one snag in the music (that irksome devil which threatens to stick his trident in their balloon) is Sjöberg’s insipid, reed-thin, chicken-squawk of a vocal which works in direct opposition to the fat licks that surround it. It is the equivalent of pitting a featherweight boxer up against three sumo wrestlers – he’s going to make a hell of a racket while the big boys trundle about after him, but that poor sod is eventually going home in a fucking ambulance. Put it this way, if you liked their debut album and haven’t grown weary of Sjöberg’s output by the close of this follow-up album, then you never will; in which case, I salute you.

Also online (with extras) @ Ave Noctum = http://www.avenoctum.com/2012/09/the-graviators-evil-deeds-napalm-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