Winters

Black Clouds In Twin Galaxies

Written by: PP on 19/07/2007 03:06:22

So the promo sheet praises Winters as pretty much the savior of all sludge/stoner rock bands, that distinguishes itself from the gray mass by simply being different and referencing from other scenes rather than just aping what's been done in the genre before. My first question to ask is what gray mass? I wasn't aware of any saturation in the stoner rock genre, let alone the sludgier side of the genre where Winters belong. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to be able to name even five acts who I'd honestly be willing to call 'sludge metal' or 'sludge rock', and not one of them deserves enough attention to be mentioned at a *cough* prestigious site as ours. As with being different, that argument holds at least some ground. But yet it doesn't prevent me contemplating if the band had a few too many spins of "Bleach" and "Badmotorfigner" before writing their debut "Black Clouds In Twin Galaxies".

But it's not like the band just re-hashes the oldschool grunge sound into some modern version of it. It is indeed possible to hear early Nirvana and Soundgarden - why not even Alice In Chains - influence through the record, but that's just because of the lo-fi production that makes the album sound like it came straight from an early 90s Seattle garage. This is merely influence, which you can probably hear on every album in this genre, and the album is actually much slower and sludgier than any song the aforementioned bands wrote during their career. There is a certain charm to their age-old time signatures and apathetic off-tune singing. Their Black Sabbath style basic riffs sound like they've seen the frying pan more than a couple of times and contain some serious groove to them especially during the squealing parts in "Fried" and "Aftershown".

Though the band manages to inject a tad bit of memorability into songs like "Oh No", the album as a whole suffers from songs that sound too much alike, so much that they sludge together into a gray mass without identity. I guess the biggest problem is that none of the songs shine - a good couple of spins into the record I'm still not able to pinpoint a song on the record that I like or dislike the most. The other problem is that it all sounds terribly outdated. This kind of lo-fi garage production combined with the grunge-ish vocal style went out of fashion in the mid 90s already, and it's 2007 today for God's sake. But to be fair, the record is fairly good for a band that willingly defines themselves as sludge. I guess if you really want to hear "Bleach" slowed down by three-fold then Winters might be for you, but personally I feel that the record lacks the same rebellion as the early Nirvana records did. Different isn't always good.

5

Download: Oh No, Fried
For the fans of: early Nirvana, Soundgarden, Wolfmother
Listen: Myspace

Release date 29.05.2007
Rise Above Records
Provided by Target ApS

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