DEATHCHANT – THRONES
Release Date: 13th October 2023
Label: RidingEasy Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Classic Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Blues, Sludge.
FFO: Thin Lizzy, any 70s Classic Rock band, really.
Review By: Paul Franklin
Nostalgia quite often gets an easy ride. It’s a golden haze viewed through rose-coloured eyewear, which does a marvellous job of obscuring the truth that a lot of the time things in the past were shit as well. For every Monty Python, you had a Bottle Boys (Google it. Frequently voted the worst sitcom of all time!), for every Thin Lizzy you had The Osmonds. So, just because a band claim to mine the seam of 70s Classic Rock, doesn’t mean that they will necessarily strike the motherload.
Which brings us on to the new album by Californian four-piece Deathchant. Can you guess where this is going?
Opener Mirror is described in the press release as possessing ‘gleaming Lizzy-isms’ and a ‘thick groove overlaid with lysergic fireworks that conjure the shaggy European movers of decades past’, but which to these ears sounds more like the very first lesson in Classic Rock 101. All the riff and melodies just come over as predictably generic, and then the vocals kick in!
Thrones was recorded live in a cabin in the remote mountain community of Fraser Park, CA. Evidently it must have been a very small cabin. Because by the sounds of it, there was no space for vocalist T.J. Lemieux in the same room as the others, and subsequently he had to record his vocals next door…inside a cupboard.
And so, it continues, the rest of the tracks on the album are a hotchpotch of over familiar guitars and tepid attempts at bluesy sludge that don’t really convince or excite. Except…
Mother Mary. The fourth track on the album and one that arrogantly defies everything written above by simply being brilliant. The band stop trying to stuff ten kilos of musical pick and mix into a small Tupperware container and instead concentrate on creating a beautifully laid back, slightly wistful groove, anchored in place by some warm and comforting bass notes. It’s great. Just a shame that it stands SO prominently amongst the rest.
(2 / 5)
