THE BIG RELAX - Souldriver (12th Planet Music)
ROCK 'N' ROLL AIN'T NO SOLUTION! - Les Viperes/Holy Curse (SDZ/Shark Attack)
This may look like a review of an EP and an album, but in reality it's three
EPs, 
since
Les Viperes and Holy Curse contribute an equal five tracks each to their combined
release, which is more like two separate EPs flying in close formation, rather
than a single album.
Since "The Big Relax" was first in through the mail slot, I'll start with that. It's from 12th Planet Music, which is a Canadian operation that seems to be specialising in stoner rock - they were behind the Sea Of Green "Northern Lights" EP released through Music Cartel and reviewed here a while ago.
Now stoner rock seems to be the bastard love child of Black Sabbath and Hawkwind,
merging
the heaviness of Sabbath into the long, drawn out riffing of the Hawklords,
only while taking the wrong medication; swapping the acid and amphetamines for
recreational substances that you have to smoke (or bake into cookies... that
works too!).
If I described this EP as a collision between stoner and arena rock, would you be intrigued or repulsed? Probably sounds like an appalling combination but, just as primitive man found that copper and tin (two very weak metals) could be smelted together to make the far stronger bronze - thus ushering in the first great leap forward in weapons technology since the stone axe - so in the right hands the stoner and arena styles can just as easily reinforce each other's strengths, while canceling out many of each other's weaknesses, rather than simply magnifying their respective shortcomings.
For me, "stoner" is generally synonymous with "ponderous". Sometimes there are good musical ideas lurking down in the murky depths, but all too often it just sounds like an amateur Black Sabbath tribute band after a few too many relaxing cones in the rehearsal room. "Arena rock", on the other hand, conjures up immediate mental images of flashy but empty technique, slick showmanship and shallow commerciality. An endless succession of arrogant, narcissistic wankers whose music is as interchangeable as their leather trousers. This is what the punk movement was rebelling against; it's what made the punks puke. In most music circles these days, you only see the term used as an insult.
The thing that amuses me about all this is the widespread influence and lasting impact of Black Sabbath. I loved that first album of theirs, but the moment it came out the critics were falling over each other in their desperate rush to attack it. While Led Zeppelin continued to curry favour by picking the pockets of every aging bluesman whose records they came across in second hand shops, Sabbath took "heavy music" somewhere else entirely and consequently paid the price for straying away from the rest of the herd.
However thirty years later their example remains pervasive. At the Monarchs' Christmas show the band were standing around in the area beside the stage, just killing time until they were due to go on and copping an earful of what the DJ was playing over the PA, just like the audience. When "Paranoid" came on, Brad Shepherd was standing with his back to room and quite unselfconsciously went straight into some classic air guitar, accompanying the song right from about the second bar to well into the chorus!
Souldriver themselves are Swedish and so, along with all the other standard stoner influences, are heirs to the likes of the Nomads and Union Carbide Productions, bands that kept the true flame burning while almost everybody else went off chasing an endless succession of next big things. On this EP they've married that traditional hard rock to the menace originating out of Sabbath's lower register, while at the same time tempering any tendency to sluggishness with a little of the sweep and pageantry of an arena act, though with none of the attendant pompousness.
If the typical Oz/Detroit roar is the sound of a Corvette racing a '69 Monaro around the deserted car park of your local supermarket on a hot Saturday night (probably more like Sunday 3am after the last pub closes, come to think of it), then this is the musical equivalent of the monster truck races at Oran Park. Big and solid, with plenty of low end grunt and fast enough to tip over on the tight curves unless handled by professionals who know what they're doing... well, either professionals or else just impulsive young punks going all out for it anyway.
The standout track of the five on this EP is "Strange Feeling 4 AM". It's built around the ghost of a bent blues riff and lumbers through the long grass like a belligerent bull elephant after snorting up a trunkful of Jack Daniels at the local watering hole. Now he's on the lookout for a root from any amenable lady elephant that crosses his path. Either that, or a good fight out in the car park. Hey Tarzan, what are you lookin' at?
The opening track, "Second Ride", is a thundering slab of Sabbath rifferama, sounding like most of the guitar is going through the bass amp, except for the shrieking solos in the middle. Next track, "Anymore", is more laid back, like Kyuss doing a Metallica impression with a catchy chorus. After repeated playings, it runs a close second in my affections to "Strange Feeling 4 AM".
"Inhale Your Destination" is the closest these guys come to a traditional stoner track, slow and sludgy like the residue in the bottom of a home made hash pipe (only set to music), while the closing "A Need To Escape" is the other big bongin' number, with plenty of fuzzed guitar and an extra unfuzzed guitar soloing over the top of it, sounding like a couple of prison escapees crashing a police roadblock in a turbo Volvo with a blown muffler, as all the guitarist's foot pedals get a workout at once.
Les Viperes are Canadian, but there any correspondence to Souldriver ends. In fact, it never really began, since Souldriver are Swedes on a Canadian label, while Les Vipers are Canadians on a French label; French Canadians from Quebec that is. Far greater are the musical differences. This is pure punk, raw and unapologetic.
Opening with "La Premiere Fois" (which a vague memory of schoolboy French prompts me to translate as "The First Thing" - or maybe "The First Time"; "temps" is time, but I think "fois" is idiomatic in this context - though I'll confess now that I don't have anywhere near as much luck with any of the lyrics that follow), Les Viperes mount a five track onslaught that goes through your skull like a dose of salts for the brain; an all purpose laxative for the mind, flushing all before it in only a few seconds over nine minutes.
While they edge dangerously close toward hardcore at a couple of points, most noticeably on the final "Blood Airport", they usually manage to ease themselves back from the brink in time, keeping sight of the other musical elements that hardcore all too often overlooks, like some trace of rhythm and melody for example. There's also a garage element to their best songs, the aforementioned "La Premiere Fois" and "Rechercher", while "Ma Solitude Et Moi" harks back to orthodox mid seventies buzz saw punk, like a fired up Johnny Rotten fronting the Buzzcocks.
The fifth track on this brief outburst of aggression is "Terroriste", a 1:29 fury during which the band seems to be trying to exhibit every musical influence they've ever had, all at once, making for a song that sounds like Monty Python's sketch of "The Batley Townswoman's Guild Presents the Battle of Pearl Harbour", only with musical instruments instead of a field of mud.
Holy Curse are like old friends, with their 1999 album "Hereafter" in particular in little danger of ever becoming a stranger to my CD player. This is their first official release since that monumental musical extravaganza and has been keenly anticipated in this household.
Their five tracks start with "Streets Of Sleep", which sounds like something that would not have been out of place on "Hereafter" and maybe even slipped off it accidentally, though the vocals are a little too far down in the mix. Otherwise it's certainly up to the standard set by that album and belts along like a street fight in the alley behind your favourite pub, before ending with a voiceover which gives it a brooding film noir effect, the sort of thing I think Wayne Kramer has tried to do with some of his spoken word pieces, though at greater (sometimes too great) length.
"Too Much Paranoia" is a new version of one of the tracks on their first album, "Livin' With A Head", not that there was anything wrong with the original version; it was one of the standout tracks in fact. However this new version is much darker and really wraps you up in the sweaty claustrophobia of the lyrics ("I lost my friends/I've killed them all/Look at my hands/All covered with blood") which the first version only inferred from a much safer distance...
"Nights Of Sin" is my favourite track at the moment. This may be subject to change at a later date, since Holy Curse songs tend to be like well cut diamonds - hard as they come and each time you hold them up to the light at a slightly different angle, you see something new that you've been missing until then - but right now this mix of moody atmospherics and shredding, screaming guitars over an insistent, driving rhythm section is exactly what does it for me.
"I Don't Dance" is a more direct, straight forward song which reminds me of some Dr Tek's sparser numbers, like "Don't Axe Me" on the first solo album for example, only with a fuller guitar sound. Come to think of it, it could almost be a response to Tek's cover of Bo Didley's "Let The Kids Dance".
"City Kids" is a cover of the same Pink Fairies song that Deep Reduction covered on the recently released "2" album. This makes for a very interesting contrast with the proto-Detroit reading given to the song by Deep Reduction. Despite the fact that the two versions are almost the same length (the Holy Curse version is actually two seconds longer, but that's due to some guitar feedback at the end), the Holy Curse version sounds like it's roaring along at twice the pace, leaving the Deep Reduction version looking almost languid in comparison.
In reality the difference in pace between the two is about ten seconds per verse, but the Holy Curse version is fleshed out to the same length by longer instrumental passages, featuring lashings of screaming guitar over a punkish, almost frantic, beat. This means that while the Deep Reduction version sounds authoritative and intimidating, the Holy Curse version has a more rebellious and resentful tone to it.
But wait, there's more! The final song also incorporates a hidden, bonus track. It's a two minute instrumental tacked onto the end of "City Kids", after about thirty five seconds of silence (like Lou Reed once said, "First thing you learn is you always gotta wait"), which belongs to the musical sub genre that I think of as "stolen car riffarama". You can imagine this as the soundtrack to a car chase, with appropriate musical cues for driving up on the footpaths, running red lights and crashing through busy train crossings. There's some sense of urgency to be sure, but you know in your heart right from the start that the cops just ain't gonna be able to catch up...
It's great to hear these guys back in action again. I just hope we don't have to wait too much longer for a new, full length album.- John McPharlin
1/2 - Souldriver
- Les Viperes
- Holy Curse