Top Dead Celebrity – High Horse
The latest record from Salt Lake City’s Top Dead Celebrity
is a ferocious beast, spewing out screeched hardcore vocals over a landscape of
stoner/bluesy/punk songs, each one as effortlessly catchy as the last.
Opening with the bluesy riffs of ‘Ghost’, it’s not long
before the guys kick start their assault on the senses with their own brand of
rock, grabbing your head an shaking it until breaking point as the track
continues to grow through levels of stoner, punk, with hints of a pop
sensibility to boot. Top Dead Celebrity are a band to keep you guessing as to
their next move, and they generally tend to creap up on you from behind with a
blunt knife. A track such as ‘Runaway’ perfectly sums this aesthetic up by blending
an aggressive six-minute song through practically every genre of music you’d
care to endeavour without losing its identity as a rock song.
The rest of the record follows through similar channels
of snarled aggression and catchy hooks, before the band throw a curveball with
the spookily whispered ‘Pull The Knife’ carrying a Mark Lanegan Band style of
musicianship, which proves a needed rest bite before the fuzzed guitar riffs of
‘The Closing’ throw the bricks back in your face, and the assault continues.
It’s going to be hard pushed to find a record with as
many memorable hooks and choruses as this all year, and putting that alongside
its brutality, the album is a benchmark to beat. With High Horse, these Utahans
have ultimately created a great rock and roll record.
Geezer – Gage
You know when a sound hits you, and it entwines itself
around your very essence, matching its shape and flow with the contours of your
body, a bluesy smoke-filled, whiskey flowing, primal sound which pauses your
day for its duration? Geezer have created such a sound on their latest EP Gage,
and it has the power to leave us transfixed, trembling in front of the speaker.
As the opening psychedelic blues riffs of ‘Ancient Song’
gently sway into your consciousness, you’re already drifting away on a smoke
cloud of heavy blues jams, at peace, until frontman Pat Harrington’s vocals
tear through you like a rusty cut-throat knife, wielding a sound of ancient
wisdom and damning context. The musicianship of all the band is an impressive
collective, soaked deeply in a Memphis vibe that can’t be faked.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Gage was simply a
gentle blues record as ‘Thorny’ delicately tickles your ears, but Geezer are a
heavy blues band, and they bring the HEAVY when the phenomenal ‘Ghost Rider
Solar Plexus’ kicks in with destructive fuzzy guitar riffs to melt the coldest
of faces, blasting you through six-and-a-half minutes of sonic blues brutality.
The epitomised track on this EP, ‘Tales of Murder and
Unkindness’, is a lengthy example of the range of musicianship that Geezer has
to offer, steeped largely in a 1960/70’s hard psychedelic rock phase, with
underlying blues riffs, and added stoner jams. Gage is a record which is heavy, not necessarily heavy in the sense of loud angry noises, but in its
truest sense; deep layers of passion, soul, and grooves to make your soul
shiver.
Witchrider – Unmountable Stairs
With softly sung vocals masking over the top of driving
stoner rock, it’s no real wonder that these Austrians are compared to QOTSA at
almost every opportunity, and with the sound and promise that the later band
had originally sparked, it’s as much of a compliment that Witchrider deserve.
Having signed with Fuzzorama earlier in 2014, their debut
full-length Unmountable Stairs is greeted with much anticipation, of which
the band carries with ease from the start. The band play a brand of fuzzy
alt-rock that fits in with the hardcore troupe, as well as the poppier
sensibilities of the genre. ‘OCD’ kicks things off with driving lo-fi riffs
that yell out teenage angst, showing that these newcomers have something to say
amongst their contemporaries. No matter how “pop” the sound becomes, theres
always an underlying stoner riff and guitar lick waiting to burst out and
remind you of just what the band truly have to offer (just listen to the climax
of ‘Black’ for evidence).
Witchrider show that with fuzz music, you don’t
necessarily have to be the loudest, or the most cut-throat, to excel: ‘SB’ is a
soft grungy song that carries pounding drums throughout without needing to yell
at you to grab your attention, while the title track is a space rock track
Monster Magnet would stick on repeat. The Austrians can glide easily through
many different genres with ease, making the record an exciting listen as there
are no safety zones to fall into.
What Witchrider carry with them, forgetting all of their
tags of alt-rock or mentions of pop and QOTSA, is potential. With their knack
for being great songwriters, their preference for things on the stoner/fuzz
side of the scale means that the band have the ability to take themselves onto truly
great things. It all started with Unmountable Stairs.
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