Occasional brilliance.
The Modey Lemon are back with another psychedelic romp into glam-grunge-garage-rock madness. Whatever you like to call it, this is a pretty heavy record; classic rock in structure generally, but with plenty of wall-of-noise fuzz and off kilter rhythms.
Often the drums beat out a hypnotic rhythm and the guitars swell in crescendos of swirling noise helping the retro feel along so sometimes it feels as if you’re slipping back to a 60s rock and roll high. Tracks like ‘It Made You Dumb’ mix this up with a 90s grunge feel, sounding a bit like Dinosaur Jr. if they were coated in Vaseline. On the downside, the fuzzy base coating everything can get a bit much at times, occasionally it doesn’t enhance the atmosphere so much as cover everything in a layer of grime that dampens the sound • you can’t quite hear what’s happening and it can feel like this is intentional in the same way that soft focus is used in films • to cover blemishes.
That said, there are some nicely dark and moody tracks here; ‘Sacred Place’ has a rumbling so dirty it’s like the buzzing of a dying fly at your ear, whether it’s from the bass or keys or both is hard to tell though. The bass on ‘Become A Monk’ is phenomenal though; the lyrics might make you stop and wonder, but the tune is sexy and danceable.
Most of the time “Season Of Sweets” chugs along at a decent pace, ‘Ice Fields’ puts a bit of a spanner in the works though. At half way through, it’s a showstopper (but not in a good way), the pace of the album is slowed right down and the tone becomes a dirge of tepid rumbles underscored by tired riffs.
The dark-glam tone of the album as a whole is really nice; there are some decent melodies, bass lines, solid vocals and hypnotic drums and at times a touch of brilliance and an undeniable high as everything comes together in the right way on certain tracks, however taken together in one sitting there is nothing new. It’s just too derivative and lost in the past to be exciting, moving or memorable.