Up From the Underground: Attik Door's "Never In Agreement

This San Francisco based band of Russian immigrants took the last year and a half to write the songs . The opener is vocal fueled radio rock in the vein of Halestorm. the 90s rap rock influences creep their head for the more staccato vocal attack of their singer Liana Tovmasyan. The smoothed out pop sense to her melodies at times do have a Gwen Stefani accent to their phrasing, but as a band they never touch upon ska and thus swerving away from Stefani's new wave quirk. Though her inner Stefani does come out in it's most unabashed manner on "Moody"

When they back off from the straight forward rock approach  on "California" and step off the distortion pedal it allows their singer more room to work with and she takes them ironically in a more Euro sounding direction despite the song's title recalling bands like the Gathering and Guano Apes. The guitar solo tend to straddle the fence of 80's arena rock when such indulgences reached their peak.This 80's element that band's like Halestorm and Pretty Reckless embrace are also given a spot light in the big chorus of "Snorting Headlines", I am sure this would be exaggerated even further if the band had settled in L.A. rather than San Francisco that tends to either have a laid back hippie vibe from the Haight Ashbury days or the metal leaning from the thrash scene that sprung from the Bay- area in the 80's birthing bands like Metallica and Testament.

One of the albums more interesting moments is the slight darker turn reflected in the lower vocal harmonies of "Cyber World" the guitar chugs in a tighter Tool like manner.One of the albums most interesting riffs its the more progressive "Kosmos". When the verse kicks in it takes a more straight forward direction, though the guitar tone remains a little more organic sounding until the bouncy chorus which is as close as they come to touching on ska elements.  The riff to "Spinning out" reminds me of the Finger Elven song that came out a few years back, where they tried to tone down the metal guitar and and masquerade themselves as a dancey band like Franz Ferdnand They are not recreating the wheel here and obviously wear their influences on their sleeves but this is well written, well produced and well executed, and better than most of the current crop of so called rock bands like Imagine Dragons ,who lack the balls to pull it off. For a band that is almost half girls to have more stones to them ...I'm not sure what it says about the current state of rock on the radio.