For fans of sludge, down-tuned guitars with heavy distortion and thick riffs accompanied by a layer of guitar effects, slow grooving drums that compliment the riffs, and high pitched screaming, check this beauty of an album out. I would say even for fans of Will Haven, give this album a shot, you might be surprised. Standout tracks include "Hats Made of Veal And That New Car Scent," A Hot Pink Shell of My Former Self," "A Distant Pond From the Rivers of Human Limelight," and "The Family That Slays Together Stays Together." -Camelo Colca
The pedigree of Belgian group Creature with the Atom Brain is phenomenal. Creature With The Atom Brain members have toured and been part of some real heavyweight outfits such as QOTSA and the underrated Millionaire. The album's guest stars, such as Mark Lanegan and Tim Vanhamel, are notable catches. The varied influences on the band's MySpace page are spot on. But for all the talent, experience and attempts at musical variety here, Transylvania is just missing that certain ‘something’ that "...Golden Gate Bridge" encompassed and feels like rock-by-numbers, which can possibly be attributed to a recent jaunt touring with Dead Weather sucking their very souls dry whilst they slept. For the record, I am a HUGE fan of The Dead Weather.
That’s not to say this is a bad record as such. When it’s good and the band lock themselves into a tight, six-minute psychedelic riffathon then it is wholly decent and worthwhile stuff. Like when, two minutes into the upbeat title track, the bass goes all fuzzy. Or when the opener ‘I Rise the Moon’ saunters into its blissed-out chorus like a stoner exiting a bedsit at 8am on a sunny morn. Or for all of the understated but genre-melding six minutes of ‘Darker than a Dungeon’, one of the few tracks where they vary the pace and time signature throughout the song’s duration.
But is it enough to hark back to bands like Kyuss and Melvins, merely aping them and providing a modern day alternative when other rock bands have moved the genre on in the meantime?
Such is the dilemma with Creature with the Atom Brain. If all you want is a sophomoric record in a largely sophomoric branch of rock’s history, then ‘Transylvania’ will serve you well. For the rest of us, until they develop a sound of their own they’ll merely continue to be the bridesmaid, but never the bride…
So here's the deal with the LA based trio, MINI MANSIONS...
....Queens of the Stone Age are on break ( they have families and other lives ya know), anyhow, Queens and Wires On Fire bass player Michael Shuman decided to get back together with some of his old mates. The "Old Mates" he reunited with were Tyler Parkford and Zach Dawes in a shitty, dusty room somewhere DEEP in the San Fernando Valley where they FUSED their minds together to form the Psych-Pop Trio, MINI MANSIONS. And a GOLD RECORD was born!! (unofficial). The 3 members are usually confined to piano, bass, and a cocktail drum kit, the LA based trio generates a Technicolor spectrum of sound drawn from the Pop,baroque, gothic, psychedelic, and cinematic realms.
Best way to describe them is The Beatles (Later stuff) and Elliott Smith and you can pretty much get a good idea from that descriptive what they sound like.
Undoubtedly, the crowning culmination of Mark Lanegan's life's work, the darkly majestic Blues Funeral offers further evidence that, for an addict, there is never any freedom from addiction.
Though apparently now clean of his former heroin habit, Lanegan's songs here positively writhe with the lingering twitch of druggy desire, lyrically reflected in varying degrees of metaphorical imagery, from the relatively direct ("Lost on a violent sea/Gone for endless days") to the more elliptical, but still fairly obvious ("The moon don't smile on Saturday's child lying still in Elysian fields/ I don't know what the doctor he did, now I'm all day long with my body in bed"). It's been a constant theme throughout Lanegan's career, but this time it's found its most appropriate and satisfying setting, in the warm, enveloping arrangements created for the songs by Alain Johannes, with textured layers of synths, Mellotron and guitars swirling miasmically about Lanegan's smoky baritone.
Track after track finds the singer crippled with boredom, contemplating the miserable passage of days. In "Gray Goes Black", the bustling krautrock motorik evokes the inner restlessness as he confronts the stasis of the soul, "so insect I'm in amber". It's a torment likewise haunting "Leviathan", where "the hours crawl by like a spider/ hangman is following me". The wan, disjointed organ solo is like to a cork bobbing on the ocean, unable to control its course, and when the closing coda of "everyday a prayer for what I never know" comes cascading in round-style layers of harmony, it feels like a supportive twelve-step anthem to which he's desperately clinging.
Musically, it's the most accomplished of Lanegan's albums. "The Gravedigger's Song" opens proceedings with a lumbering but limber groove that evokes the galloping menace of apocalyptic horsemen, and Josh Homme helps bring a Gun Club flavour to the predatory fuzz-guitar groove and strident lead line of "Riot in My House". Heavier still is "Quiver Syndrome", with harsh, strident guitar chording over a thunderous caterpillar-track beat. At the other extreme, the classic blues flood motif of "Bleeding Muddy Water" is set to an oozing, sticky blend of shivering guitar and trembling keyboard.
"St Louis Elegy" features a similarly dark, throbbing undertow of low frequencies, with the slow shuffle of drum-machine like manacles on the soul as a fretful, earthbound Lanegan contemplates death from the skies. Comparative light relief comes in the centre of the album, with "Ode to Sad Disco" recalling Joy Division's "Atmosphere" – if that could be considered "light" – and the lovely, fatalistic melody of "Phantasmagoria Blues" floating on an oceanic miasma stippled with prickly percussion, a formula triumphantly reprised with added Mellotron and reversed guitars for the concluding "Tiny Grain of Truth". Taken as a whole, it's a marvellous piece of work, boasting a rare congruence between lyrical themes and musical evocations, and fronted by one of the most broodingly characterful voices in rock music. -The Independent(UK)
