Search - Pearls & Brass :: Indian Tower

Mind-Blowing Blues-Based Heaviness; HIGHest Recommendation

317 East 32nd | Toledo, OH USA | 01/25/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I've been waiting a month to review this labyrinthine leviathan of a CD. Pearls & Brass have done it again; no sophomore jinx here.



If you're not familiar with their previous (self-titled) release, you'll want to buy that as well, but what began as a heavy, riff-based blues band has now become a thundering, careening, smoke-belching, steel-blue freight train. (Once, when I was in kindergarten, I drew a picture of railroad tracks that made a turn at a right angle. While that was pretty dada for a five-year-old, it would have made an excellent image for the inside of a Pearls and Brass CD insert, because this band takes musical right angles at full steam all the time.)



You'll whoop with evil joy as you listen to the opener, "The Tower," which sounds like a heavy blues band imitating a locomotive with seven round wheels and three pentagonal ones pulling away from the station, followed immediately by the thunderous stomper "No Stone," a song that is actually about once-pristine graveyards now "desecrated" by rotting human flesh, where angry, animated trees use their powerful roots to exhume the offending bodies and toss them into the air. The gruesome image makes an excellent argument for cremation (chorus: "When I'm dead and gone, I don't need no stone...") and the band are clever enough to leave open the titular reference to "no stone left unturned" (by the trees...) Scary, heavy, Edgar Allan Poe stuff here, and those are just the first two tracks.



All over the disc are odd time signatures; sinister riffs repeated three times, seven times, eleven times... Yet the music never becomes prog-silly because it's so flippin' heavy, and the blues element is always churning away like lava underneath the weird terrain of the arrangements.



Although the most bluesy downtempo songs like "Wake In The Morning" and "Black Rock Man" are excellent, the thoroughly harrowing, shape-shifting tracks like "Pray For Sound" (pretty much an ear-splitting ditty about tinnitus), "The Face Of God" and the insane "Boy Of The Willow Tree" (you've got to hear it to believe it) are what make this THE HEAVY CD TO BEAT THIS YEAR. It's only January 24th, but I feel confident. It's that good.



Oh yes, there are two fingerpicked steel-string acoustic tracks, and these also rip in their own way.



This CD is not Heavy Metal. It's not really the Blues. It's not Prog Rock. It's not '70s Dinosaur Rock. It's not '90s Stoner Rock. It's parts of all those, hacked away from their respective decaying carcasses, stitched together on a table and brought to life by a bolt of lightning named Pearls & Brass. This CD is to most cookie-cutter "heavy" discs as Beck-Ola is to Led Zeppelin II: that is to say, denser, smarter, more angular, and better vocally. Let me put it this way: if you buy this CD and are disappointed, I'm really sorry about your taste in heavy rock 'n' roll."

Only seen them live but......

Maeda Telecaster | USA | 08/06/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"these fellas grind into your brain like a heavy, dark sludge. a power trio, yes, but pure and syrupy power is what they deliver. sluggish, punchy, and like a sleazy drug you weren't sure you wanted to do but did anyway, all at once. phenomenal in their own simple way, and you won't stop headbanging, if only slightly, to this intense cornicopia (sp?) of drone."