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Whores - Clean
Released by: Brutal Panda Records
Released on: October 29, 2013.
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Hailing from Atlanta, Georgia, after forming in 2010, Whores are a noisy three piece that channel noisy, doomy, sludgy metal with some inspiration from whatever punk or noise crossover bands you might want to throw into the mix. Think Jesus Lizard meets Helmet meets High On Fire meets… a band that likes feedback. I've never seen them live but apparently they're great. Who is in the band? Christian Lembach handles vocals and guitar, Travis Owen: beats relentless on the drums and Jake Shultz down tunes his bass for maximum blast power. At any rate, their newest six song EP from Brutal Panda Records is called Clean and it's out soon. Some MP3s were sent over for review purposes, so let's do that.
The complete track listing for Clean is as follows:
Baby Bird / Last Looks / I Am Not A Goal Oriented Person / Cougars, Not Kittens / Blue Blood / I Am An Amateur At Everything
Baby Bird starts the album off with a blast of serious FUZZ. The guitars are way up in the mix and they're bombastic. The vocals kick in over pounding drums and the chorus lays overtop of you and smothers you. The verses are sung over a basic bass riff and a basic drum beat, so you can hear them and understand them, but then the chorus comes back and buries you again. Last looks follows suit, in fact the first track basically leads right into it without any sort of audible seam. The guitars aren't quite as all encompassing here and the bass line is maybe a bit more thick with a few more notes to it, while some feedback builds well in the background during a break before the vocals kick back in. At four minutes in length, it's long enough to get somewhere but never overstays its welcome. I Am Not A Goal Oriented Person is a fairly short blast that last just under three minutes and which effectively marks the middle point of the album by the time it's done. Good stuff.
Blue Blood is the longest song on the album at almost seven minutes, we get a basic and almost primitive drum beat setting the stage. A guitar riff comes up over top as the vocals come in and you wonder if this is going to sound like Helmet. It does, for a short period maybe, but that's okay. Once the seeds have been planted, the song definitely takes on a fairly epic stoner rock sound. This is slower and sludgier than anything else on the record, not as blistering but a solid slab of heavy nevertheless. Whores are definitely operating on a much larger scale with this track than on the tracks that come before it. The next song, Cougars, Not Kittens, definitely gets the award for best title on the EP. A bouncing guitar/bass/drum beat fires in unison briefly before the vocals kick in and blast off in a bunch of different directions. This one is more relaxed in spots but that's barely relaxed by most people's standards and some interesting experiments with feedback makes for a nifty sound.
Last but not least, we get I Am An Amateur At Everything, which is also a great title for a song. The guitar in the intro is heavy as you'd expect, but almost melodic, not quite mellow but close as it's going to get on this recording. From there it builds, it gets heavier and there's some stonery elements at play. The vocals don't kick in until about a minute and a half and there's a weird chunky riff behind them that initially sounds off, but then we're back to heavy, Sabbathy doom on the guitar. This track clocks in at just over five minutes, it's erratic in the way that the whole album is but more traditional in the sense that it's not as noisy so much as it is lots of heavy riffing. It's a good ending to a pretty rad album that just sounds big and crazy and loud. And that's a good thing.
Check out their bandcamp page here.
