CD reviews

Graveyard

Graveyard
(Tee Pee)
*7.1*
Goes well with: Black Sabbath, Black Mountain, skinny jeans and unwashed hair

Few things stimulate my gag reflex quicker than seeing the words “Swedish” and “metal” in the same sentence. And if said band names itself something as banally ominous as, say, “Graveyard”? I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. But despite hailing from the birthplace of Swedish death metal (Gothenburg) and boasting a song called “Satan’s Finest,” Graveyard is wholly unlike evil-and-eyeliner Scandinavian bands that follow in the severed vein of Dimmu Borgir. Rather, they merely rob the grave of ’70s psychedelic blues rock while gently dry-humping the corpses of The Yardbirds, Cream and Black Sabbath.

To call Graveyard “derivative” would be both painfully obvious and missing the point. It’s messy and imperfect, sure, but still lands Graveyard somewhere above Dirty Sweet and below Black Mountain on the neo-classic rock scale. They don’t scream originality, but if Graveyard were delivered on unlabeled vinyl instead of digital download, it could be difficult to decipher whether it was facsimile or genuine article. Songs like “Thin Line” tread a fragile boundary between rehash and rejuvenation, but Graveyard carries these fuzzy, howling, time-warped tracks (including “Evil Ways,” “Lost in Confusion” and “Submarine Blues’) well enough to come off as commendable emulation rather than just stale imitation.

Graveyard plays on Sunday, July 19, at Bar Pink.

Black Moth

Super Rainbow
Eating Us
(Graveface)
*7.3*
Goes well with: Lysergic acid diethylamide, magic mushrooms, grain fungus

Vocoder? Check. Theremin? Check. Fistful of, well, we’re not exactly sure what it is, but we’re going to take it anyway? Check. Oh, look—a unicorn!

Fans of Black Moth Super Rainbow are used to snarky reviews linking their brand of experimental music with psychedelic drugs, but these free spirits from Pennsylvania bring it on themselves with song titles like “Fields are Breathing” and dressing a limited-edition release of their new record, Eating Us, in a fur-covered jacket.

For their fourth album, BMSR brought in Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann, who recently worked with MGMT. The album retains BMSR’s trademark trippy sound, but it’s a bit more diverse, rhythmically aggressive and occasionally epic—even though it’s seldom clear what the songs are about.

One clue might be the first track, “Born on a Day the Sun Didn’t Rise,” which echoes the first line of a song called “Love Wears Black” by mid-’60s Orlando garage rockers We the People. (Don’t get too excited: It sounds really emo, but the WTP song is a love song about a nun). Nevertheless, Eating Us is an arresting and accomplished effort that suggests the band is poised for bigger things.

Major Lazer

Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do
(Downtown)
*5.5*
Goes well with: Eek-a-Mouse, Santigold, white boys doing reggae

I tried it on the stereo and with headphones, and I even tried sparking one up. But I just can’t get into Major Lazer, the hit-and-miss dancehall-reggae collaboration between DJ and producer Diplo and DJ Switch’s fidget-house.

OK, so maybe the doobage helped a little. And on the surface, Guns has all the makings of an excellent album. Diplo might be the greatest thing to come out of Florida since oranges and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and between him and Switch, they’re pretty much responsible for exposing the world to M.I.A., Santigold and Spank Rock. Here, they’ve amassed a who’s-who of modern reggae singers that cover the genre’s basics: the struggle (“Cash Flow”), love (“Can’t Stop Now”) and, of course, ganja (“Mary Jane”). They even throw in some auto-tune action on the catchy “Keep it Goin’ Louder,” which is weird because I thought Jay-Z declared it dead right around the same time Michael Jackson met his demise.
In any case, the fact that Major Lazer throw in an electro R&B banger that more resembles Black Eyed Peas than Black Uhuru only proves how uneven the album is. Plus, that auto-tuned baby sample toward the end of the record (certainly the most annoying since Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?”) really harshed my mellow.