HOBO - Go Home Without Yourself
We’ve been following these guys since we featured them
back in ’13 in Sunday Sludge with their demo filling us with sharp sludge
delight, but now with their debut full-length LP, all our hopes have come into
fruition with gloriously heavy pounding effect.
Like all good sludge bands, HOBO start off heavy,
continue heavy, and end heavily. The record opens with ‘Blood Horse’ (also on
The Shit Hands ep) which basis its song structure around gut-churning bass
lines and low tuned, well, everything, from subtly heavy drumming to darkly
savage vocals that charge the song into submission. Where HOBO differ from many
other sludge bands is that their songs are shorter, much shorter in fact, with
the majority of songs on Go Home Without Yourself just passing the two-minute
mark. It’s a punk ethos of the band coming in, playing their music, making
their point, then quickly fucking off before anyone knows what’s just happened.
The album grows as each track clambers over the last with
its aggressive party-like sludge thrashing your body to the floor with
highlights ‘Bottom Shelf’ and ‘Piss Stank’ paying particular attention to the
tag of “SLUDGE TILL YOU DIE” as you girate like a lunatic to the groove-laden
guitar lines with glee. The brilliantly titled ‘Go Home Without Your Teeth’ and
album closer ‘That’s It!’ exemplify what HOBO do best, and that would be joyous
sludge if you haven’t been paying attention so far.
HOBO come across like early versions of High on Fire and
Mastodon jamming with each other in their rawest forms, in a dank basement,
with a disco ball, lots of cans of beer, all in their teens, recording with no
production values (because they’re for the glamorous bands); this is music in
its purest form, and, well, you can’t really do real sludge any other way.
Welcome The Howling Tones - Green & Blues
Farnborough, Hampshire, UK, is not known for its rich
history of the blues, but somehow, the five guys of Welcome The Howling Tones
have managed to twin the town with Memphis, Tennessee, on the quite stunning
debut LP Green & Blues. This is in large part thanks to two main things:
the bassy percussion intertwined with a lead guitar twang emanating somewhere
from the deep south, and secondly the powerful vocals of Iain ‘Catscratch’ Turner
that drive each song with echoes of hurt, passion, and guttural energy.
Green & Blues opens with three tracks of
unadulterated blues rock majesty, songs that Clutch would be quite proud to own
for themselves. ‘Deep River Blues’ builds, crashes, rebuilds and crushes some
more with gentle guitar tones carrying the spine of the song and its centred
emotional core, before all instruments combine to create gorgeous blues
overtones, before the vocals cut like a blunt rusty knife, silencing all
outside noise, just holding your attention long enough for that “woah” moment. ‘Eyes
To Hypnotise’ teeters on the edge of stoner rock as the driving rhythm sections
and aggressive vocal style powers the song through its five minutes of desert
rock crossover, while ‘Broken Man’ is more stripped down blues groove number,
lead guitar led with its soul laid bare, and it’s simply a beautiful track.
The
rest of the record carries along the same grove/blues/stoner feel with some
jams becoming party numbers (‘Dip Me in Mud’), some soulful tunes (‘Burn My Bones’),
and others just downright bluesy master classes (‘She’s My Kind Of Woman’).
One thing that has to be said about this band’s debut
record is that it is an almighty impressive beast, fooling you into thinking
you’re listening to a band who’ve been riding the scene for decades, with a
songbook full of memories, ideas, and a life long lived. Green & Blues is a
record that will sit comfortably alongside 1950’s howling blues
records and modern day Palm springs desert scene grooves, and it deserves such
high acclaim.
Plainride - Return Of The Jackalope
The debut record from Cologne, Germany’s Plainride is 13
tracks of pure hard stoner rock epicness, you know that kind that that makes
your arse cheeks tighten with excitement? That kind! No, just me? Oh well then.
The band don’t sing about much in the way of deep, or life-changing events, but
instead exemplify everything that they love: cars, beer, beards, and partying! “Today
I killed my father with a shovel and a shotgun” opens ‘Salt River’ as the band
carve their way through four-and-a-half minutes of simple and effective fists
to the wall stoner/heavy rocking (tempted to use the popular spelling of “rawk”,
but we just can’t bring ourselves to do it). The vocals have a great southern
bluesy twang to them, soaked like an aged whiskey malt to its purest form.
There
are many bands out there doing a similar thing to Plainride, but they don't have the same effect as it takes more than just a cool sounding vocalist, the
right look and origins, you need what Plainride have in abundance: awesome
songs! From the badass rock of the title track, the blues-heavy groove of ‘(The
Beards Upon) Mt Rushmore’, the momentary respite in the acoustic ‘Vengeance’,
and the straight-up party stoner anthem of ‘Beermachine’, the four Germans have
crafted a solid album of great songs, heavy riffs, and downright rocking
that’ll keep Return Of The Jackalope on your summer stereo for a long time,
just make sure you’re fully stocked up on beer!
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