One half Karp and on half Murder City Devils, there is more of the thundering noise rock that Karp made and less of the dark punk the Devils dealt out. Their newest album finds them leaning more in a hard rock direction. Like if you took all of the beer commercials out of the Foo-fighters. Their songs are compact like punk rock and rumble with burly fuzz. The vocals are a mid register tenor that remind a little of Blue Oyster Cult. "Father's Day" rocks out a little harder, but is not what I would call metal. The drumming gets more articulate on "Blacker Holes". The vocals come across a little more crooned. The songs begin to take on more of a throb and begin to become not as carefully written, but seem like a series of jammed ideas that happened to get recorded. When "Popular Demand" doesn't know where to go, it fades into droning noise.
They do stream line this into a more taunt form of rock n roll on "Own Throats". The Sabbath influence is more apparent here and makes sense why people want to file them under doom or sludge, but I don't think one song where things begin to head in a more metal direction makes them a metal band. Things do reach an impressive level of intensity that metal fans will be able to appreciate, then they drop down out of the range of metal into more dreamy 60s pop. It's well sung, but hovers over the same thing for too long.There is a little more groove to "Diagnostic Front" and then some of the bluster drops out for the more soulful horses. While it's well sung it works off one idea and doesn't progress much beyond that. I'll give this album an 8.5, as they capture some powerful sounds and more melodic than I thought they were going to be going into this, but their songwriting skills are more along the line of hopeful jams which can be a gamble in regards to how they come together to form actual songs and not just ideas of what might sound cool if they were part of an actual song.
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