The Boston stoner rock band is back. This is their third album. The guitar heroics really take the spot light three and half minutes in. The layered production is very lush and it's clear these guys are not far removed from progressive rock.
Six minutes in and you are getting more surreal passages no quite Pink Floyd like in their trippy endeavors , but a slight hint they are wanting to steer the ship in that direction. They punch back in strong and you can already tell this album is going to be filled with interesting guitar tones. The psychedelics kick in by the time they are ready to warm you up into "the Falling Veil". The jammy aspect of what they do seems to compensate for the lengthy songs. These guys are not metal, but I can see how like say Porcupine Tree they might appeal to metal heads. The riff to the second song is a mathy. The vocals a re sung with more of a rock aggression and don't coast as much ass they did on the first song. Midway into the song it begins to remind me of less metal version of Mastodon. This songs main failing to me is it doesn't groove and wanks on your tits without the vocals really giving me anything to sink my teeth into. They play it well and it sounds good, but doesn't grip me as much. In the last minute they do lock in to rock out.
"Staving of Truth" goes from sounding like something Minus the Bear would do to a more fuzzed out Kyuss like sound. The vocals are punching without being aggressive on this one, almost like Page Hamilton from Helmet if he was more relaxed. The guitars wind around them. This song winds around a proggy jam before the guitar chug it a little to a climax. If you are a guitar player you will dig these guys as they have the riffs , but the acrobatics as well without getting to tied into a shred fest. "Blind" does have more groove once they get wound up into the verse, but wanders around in a similar fashion to the other songs on this album. Some of this could have been trimmed back a little to give the song more room to breathe. When it does break down into a more Beatles like place, it makes the guitars kicking back in more effective.
I preferred the tension these guys hang on with "Sonntag" . In fact it's like the Swans or Velvet Underground in the sense that they let the drone linger as it leads you down the rabbit hole. They slowly add other sounds to build it. The bass player proves he is pretty much a champ as well on this one. "Thousand Hands" is still like most of these songs on the jammy side, but does seem like a logical progression from the previous song. Vocals do kick in for this one. When they are going for the more indifferent style of hard rock vocals like Baroness uses, I don't think they add a helluva lot, guess I already went through a phase where I listened to most of that sort of thing about 12 years ago. As a whole this album might no be 100 percent my thing , but I can appreciate where they are going here and can hear how talented they are so I have nop problem giving this one a 8.5 .
5.1
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