Bringing black metal tonalities and drum-work to otherwise fairly sedate melodies and indie rock flavoring, making for an interesting but not entirely successful blend. Bounding between clean crooning and rough howls, the vocals give the drums stiff competition for doing the most work in the music, while the guitar tends to provide either wandering background tunes or straight-forward counterpoint to the drums’ harder rhythms. Apart from the earnest genre-bending, there’s not too much in the way of compelling material or emotional depth (e.g., “I never wanted to feel this way!”, from closing track “Whispers”), and, in spite of some clear potential, the whole thing ends up feeling sadly underdeveloped.
This compilation spotlights over a dozen underknown garage rock groups, several of them with just one or two singles to their name, but highly cool across the board. Blendings of surf, funk, pop, traditional rock & roll, and psychedelic are on display, with high enthusiasm helping sand over the general roughness of the production. The songs go by quickly enough that their similarities blend together a bit, but the sharpness of the riffs and choruses, along with the good humor, pop up some distinction to balance out the bleed-over of the electric guitar tones. Some Beatles-like experimentation with Eastern flavors crops up occasionally, but rarely as more than just a glazing over the regular rock foundations. All in all, a nice tour through some obscure tunes, and a neat touchstone for historical context.
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 The instruments do an impressive job of tumbling between outpoured anger and withdrawn brooding, and while the vocals lend a clear human element to the emoting, they come off much better when they’re limited to embellishment or reinforcement of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.
Introducing themselves to the world with the six tracks of this demo, the Swedish group of Sinners Grief play a straight-faced strain of retro doom metal with upbeat pacing and sturdy riffs, while the clean but down-cast vocals belt out mourning and foreboding. It all comes together well enough, but despite some game efforts from each musician, the songs of the demo end up sounding too repetitive to make much of an impression, which combines with the throw-back nature of the music to cast doubts on the likelihood of the band having enough ideas to pull together a worthwhile full album. Despite that, the songs are played with enough verve for fans of low-budget doom to give it a cursory listen, and with the band putting out feelers for a replacement bassist, there’s at least the suggestion that they’re looking to improve their situation.
In this soundtrack to one of the more popular space shooter video games, composer Hisayoshi Ogura pulls together a nice range of compositional techniques, bouncing from fluttery light synths to pounding bass ostinato, flowing smoothly through hooky anthems and solid stage themes. Casual touches of humor help elevate the late-’80s electronica’s coolness, with serious dives through straight-forward power riffing providing a substantial portion of the score’s run. The tracks veer closer towards early techno than to electro, though they mostly dodge falling into loop studies, and the few trips through subterranean gloom show the arcade cabinet’s sound hardware put to impressively nuanced use. Good stuff, if fairly niche.
In the first of this EP’s two tracks (”Astral Death”), Dö assemble a keening pounder of doom, circling around a central riff that receives increasingly brutal add-ons over the course of its repetitions. Rumbling bass and hard-beaten hi-hats serve up the most dominant parts of the soundscape, while toothy guitar gnashes about in its near-submersion and phlegmy growls add nasty texture.
“Astral Birth” takes the B-side with a tabla-like rhythm section, phasing guitar, and vocal drones, making the shift into psychedelic while maintaining its heaviness. If anything, the stripped-down nature of the second track gives its weighty elements greater impact, though it probably wouldn’t hit as hard without the mess of busy work the first side offers. But put together, the two tracks reach a level of complementary boosting that few singles achieve (with the closing climax making excellent use of a riff pull from the beginning), so kudos to Dö.
Scrambled Brains 