Slow Season - Westing (2016)
Slow Season's third outing, Westing, kicks off with a
frenetic blues rock jam that sounds like the bastard child of Clutch and Led
Zeppelin. Propulsive, energetic and impossible
to dislike Y'Wanna fulfils the classic role of an opening track. It grabs you where it hurts and it never lets
go.
The thumping, hard hitting drum work may lack
discretion but it does supply the sort of furious backing Bonham would be happy
with whilst the stop start riffage of Flag owes a similarly large debt to Jimmy
Page. If the spirit of Led Zeppelin
hangs heavy over Slow Season then it's no bad thing and nothing that a million
doom bands haven't done with Black Sabbath.
In ways more than just their influences, Slow Season have a
decidedly retro aesthetic. The majority
of the songs on Slow Season fade out, rather than lasting until their natural
endings. It might not seem a lot but it
hasn't been the norm to fade rock songs out since the seventies. The slow grinding blues rock of The Jackal summons
to mind the dust drenched blues of the deltas as re-imagined through the sphere
of scuzzy old school hard rock.
Slow Season may not be innovators as such but there is
something paradoxically refreshing about their sound. You can compare them to the old legends all
you like but it doesn't diminish the fact that they're actually very good at
what they do and Slow Season proves this as much here if not more than their
previous efforts.
If criticism had to be meted it would lie for me with the
production; on songs like Saurekonig there's a slightly murkiness to the sound -
a lack of instrument clarity. Perhaps
this is intentional, but a drier more directly punchy production would have
better suited these decidedly to-the-point songs. It's a small fly in an otherwise very enticing
jar of ointment though.
Make no mistake, those who like their rock heavy on the dirt
and even heavier on the blues will find much to enjoy here. Those who don’t like heavily influenced music
might be best to move on, as it's not hard to identify the album’s roots if
you're out to do so – but I see no reason to penalise them for that. Slow Season have produced an excellent heavy
blues rock record here and those enamoured with the genre's downtrodden charm
should give this album a listen pronto.
~ Martin
For fans of; Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Wishbone Ash, Groundhogs, Kadavar
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