Album Reviews
Current Rotation 8/6/2012
The first thing you notice about The Gentlemen Bastards is the obvious Clutch influence. It’s in the guitars. This band is a lot more than just a ” me too” Clutch wanna be. Their infectious grooves on guitar are about the only thing that resembles Clutch. Vocalist Will Quinn sounds nothing like Neil Fallon. His vocals are of a much higher tone for one. It’s a bit more harmonious at times. This self titled release is 52 minutes of infectious grooves. Not to heavy, never to light. Great straight up hard rock and roll, that’s what this is about. A good time is to be had with this album, that’s for sure.
Listen to 4 of the tracks below. The album is available from the band both digitally and physically (cd).
I’ve had this album open on my web browser for awhile now. I couldn’t even tell you how long but it’s be awhile. Far to long. When I finally got to listen to this I had to kick myself in the ass for not listening a lot sooner. Heavy stoner rock with a lot of rifftastic grooves. It’s mostly instrumental and has a killer psychedelic doom overtone throughout.In fact, the third track, “L.” is a 12 minute doomy trippy ride.This is an album you’ll definitely want to be intoxicated for. Even if you don’t have a poison of choice, this would still be a great one to listen to.
“Pouring out both melodic and atmospheric guitar riffs over driving bass and tight drum work, Sweet Love is fuzz-rock that will put you on a bus back to the days of 70′s stoner rock and beyond. The band’s debut album “Motor” is a tightly packed 35 minutes of heavy rock and roll with soulful lyrics culminating in head-banging hits.”The bio says it all right there. Infectious fuzzed out blues rock. Imagine The Black Keys only a bit harder and more fuzzed out. As the bio says, soulful lyrics, is what helps make this one really enjoyable. Sure they may not be singing about chump change or being lonely, but they’ve got some pretty powerful songs here.
So you’ve got a splitting headache what do you do? Normally you’d pop a few aspirins and wait it out. Well I think I have another cure. Besides headaches it can cure just about anything that ails you. The band Make have this nice little album out called Trephine. It’s dark, it’s dirty, it’s ambient, and it’s gritty. Trephine is alot of things besides those. What’s that you ask? Well sludgy and full of crushing riffs, enough to set your head straight. Even at the times the album does light up (slightly) and is an ambient bliss, it’s still enough to wrap around you and suck you in. I do believe that Trephine should be and is the soundtrack to the eventual apocalypse.
This next one has had my head spinning for days now. Head Honcho is the newest EP by The Janitors. Head Honcho will attract you and memorize you for 30 minutes with it’s heavily fuzzed out sound. They take some of the best that the The Black Angles have to offer and triple that. Lots of fuzz, feedback, and phasar to have your head spinning for days. This is some of the best mix of heavy psych, psychedelic rock, and shoegaze I’ve heard in a long time. The full EP is out at the end of August but you can preorder and get it 2 weeks earlier.
2 Comments
Thanks very much for featuring our album! We really appreciate all the hard work you do to promote independent hard rock and metal.
August 7, 2012 at 1:50 pm