To the Unknown --- Desert Lord --- 2014 (Under a Serpent Sun Records)
I’m not sure how well established stoner metal is in Finland, and Desert Lord have only really been together for four years now, with this being their debut album, but I’ve heard some pretty damn fine music come out of this part of Scandinavia and am interested in checking this one out. If nothing else the label name is cool --- kind of ironic that the catalogue reference becomes USSR! But this is a short album, only six tracks in total and none of them epic monsters: the longest is just under ten minutes. Still, the whole thing clocks in at a respectable fifty minutes total time. But who are Desert Lord?
That’s a really good question. I’ve mentioned before that I have a real problem with bands who have MySpace, Facebook, Soundcloud or Bandcamp pages but refuse to put any information about themselves there. Desert Lord appear to be another, more concerned with gig dates and selling their album than letting us in on who they are. We’re not all fans, you know, though maybe we will be. But it would be nice to know who you are! But no. Not a thing. Even the band members give only their first names, which we’ll get to. Other than that I’m in the dark. I’m assuming this is not the goth metal band
Dessert Lord, whose debut album “Don’t trifle with me” was followed by the successful “Ice cream in the sun” …. okay, I’ll stop now.
Armed with absolutely no information other than vague references to Sabbath and words like “cool”, “great” and, yes, the eternally annoying and most overused word in the American language, “awesome”, let’s step away from the city walls and ride off into the desert, to see if we can meet this mysterious entity and figure out what it’s all about.
Good hard guitar to get “Forlorn caravan” underway, and while Sampo the vocalist has a raw, tough voice it’s certainly nothing on the lines of death growlers; sort of reminds me of Lemmy or Danny Joe Brown. Good punchy rocker with a lot of traditional Metal influences, sort of a 70s hard rock thing going on too. Actually, to be fair, this sounds rather dated. Not the best of openings I must admit. “Wonderland”, one of three nine-minute songs on the album, starts much slower, kind of a Doom Metal idea to it, the obvious comparison being Sabbath. Good work from Janne on the guitar, and slow steady percussion from Mika behind the kit. Instrumental for the first nearly three minutes then Sampo comes in with a sort of pained, wounded vocal.
Gets a little --- only a little --- faster, sort of slow boogie feel, but so far I’m a little disappointed and more than a little bored. Let’s hope it gets better. Okay. okay. A nice acoustic guitar opening to “Expanding egos” with more than a hint of Genesis’s “Horizons” in it, a slower, more laidback piece, though it’s another nine --- almost ten --- minuter, so I doubt it will stay this way all through the song. Decent sound effects, very ambient, then a harder guitar comes through on punching drums as we move into the second minute, and the tempo becomes grindy, doomy, thick and heavy. Vocals in the third minute, speeds up in the sixth, but for me it’s still pretty much a case of this band being a poor Sabs ripoff.
Some nice work on the bass there by Roni, but though there are extended guitar passages I haven’t really yet heard anything I could call a solo … oh. Now I have. Just near the end here. “New dimensions” is exactly the opposite, just more of the same and I’m getting really bored now. These guys need to try something different if they want to stand out, and right now they’re just fading into the background as yet another generic doom/stoner metal band. Nice bit of acoustic there again, with a sort of spoken vocal, but that’s soon pushed aside and we’re back to the grind, literally. Well, following this seems Sampo channels Nick Cave on “Manic survivor’s song”, and it’s not half bad. Kind of slow blues with a weary, doomed feel about it, acoustic guitar, slow drums, nice bassline.
Pretty damn good guitar solo and I think this is the first song where Desert Lord may have woken me up, nudged me and had me maybe begin to take notice. Mind you, it’s the fifth of six tracks, so unless the closer is phenomenal (and even if it is) they’ve probably left it too late. Yeah, they have. “Become aware” is just a rehash of everything else, bar the above, they’ve done on the album.
TRACKLISTING
1. Forlorn caravan
2. Wonderland
3. Expanding egos
4. New dimensions
5. Manic survivor’s song
6. Become aware
Nothing else to say really. A big let down. Just relieved there are only the six tracks, as I don’t think I could have sat through much more. Totally generic, nothing new, nothing stands out other than “Manic survivor’s song”, and that’s a bit of a pearl among swine, but the rest is completely derivative and this album gets a big fat MEH from me.