On their first full album, released six years after their debut EP, Norska pack in six tracks of heavy sludge, with doomy textures knitted into the bridges and sub-melodies. Despite the harshness of the vocals and lead guitar spurts, there’s a disarming undercurrent of melancholy, mainly due to the communicative handling of the bass, which leads to some interesting back-and-forth between the two main styles. The instruments do an impressive job of tumbling between outpoured anger and withdrawn brooding, and while the vocals lend a clear human element to the emoting, they come off much better when they’re limited to embellishment or reinforcement of the music.
When the vocals take the lead, which is usually during the more sludgy portions, it ends up feeling like the band is sacrificing nuance, with the howls overshadowing the tone-work while the drums get muddied in the mix. There’s some strong moments to the music, but the move away from their mostly-instrumental song-writing on the self-titled EP toward more standard vocal allotment doesn’t feel like a fair trade. Instead, it seems to hamper the songs, and for a majority of the music, it feels as though the singing could have been carved out without drastically affecting the impact of the playing. That the band is working hard to keep themselves out of stagnant reliance on successful past approaches is appreciable, but for an album so long in the making, it’s surprising that they were satisfied enough with this point of the refinement to release it as a full LP.
Scrambled Brains 