After one demo and two EP's Sex Type Thing is back with their new album Checked Up By Time. This Stoner Rock band from Saint Petersburg has grown a lot with this album. The songs and sound are much better than the previous recordings. Checked Up By Time contains seven awesome songs with nice drums and bass, great guitars and an excellent singer. Don't let pass this album! Go listen and buy it! Enjoy!
I have to admit something. I love short, straight-to-the-point albums. You press the PLAY button, then you find yourself thirty minutes later in the opposite corner of the room, totally dysfunctional, amazed and with low blood sugar. That’s sort of what I am right now, although I’ve checked every possible corner of the apartment, due to constantly pressing that same PLAY button.
Sex Type Thing come from Saint Petersburg, Russia. Michael Chigidin (vocals, guitars) and Pavel Voinov (guitars) founded Sex Type Thing in 2009, after years spent in various outfits such Airbag, Ty Cobb and Ebola. The same year they put out an album called Southern Dreams from Northern Reality, which has received very good critiques from the local and national press. This year they’ve come up with brand new album released on RAIG, the 32 minutes long Checked Up By Time.
One expects an album like this to be straight and dirty, and at the same time modern and satisfactory for all those whose line between old and new is almost invisible. Three basic elements construct Checked Up By Time and these are: stoner rock, grunge and blues (rock). The album kicks off with the sound of an emergency alert (siren) in Get Rid exploding in the series of riffs that jump out from grunge’s to stoner rock’s dirtiness. I have to admit that I would love if Chigidin’s vocals were a bit more aggressive, but anyway the man does his job more than well. The song is a real energetic bomb which culminates at the end when all of the song’s angst gets shown through an act of spitting. Literally.
The things keep on rocking with Feel the Same, a very catchy track with Brant Bjork echoing from time to time. That’s a plus. The Brant Bjork influences always come as a plus. And the Chigidin/Voinov guitar duo delivers hard-edged riffs and insanely good solos, pushing forward while the rhythm section keeps up. Tomorrow dwells between frantic and calm, being a lengthy, diverse piece. To vindicate the grunge stylistic employment, the guys head in with Only Angel Knows which is, compared to the previous three tracks, a mid-tempo tune with a classic rock style guitar solo. I have to mention the use of acoustic guitars and Fender Rhodes keyboards, which fit well with a whole image of setting the course for a calmer direction.
This “break” is cut with Black River, taking things a level up to the same pace first three tracks already set. The song makes me wish Chigidin really shows more of the power of his voice. It’s obvious that he can scare the shit out of me, so use it, man! And that drum nailing by the end of the song makes the difference that builds up the bulk of this album. Here we go again. My Obsession is obsessive, it takes you up with its memorability, then lets you hit the ground while shitting your pants. Getting to the end of the album makes me feel that angst I mentioned above, thus I appear to be this straight-in-the-face reviewing inglorious basterd. The blues categorization is not forgotten, it comes in the shape of closing Long Way Home Blues, with all those structured bluesy chugs brought up with the lip accordion-guitar solo “conflict”.
And this is it. Direct, uncompromisely and rocking hard – that would be the motto of this record. If you found yourself, grab it and play it loud!
(By Nikola Savić at Prog Sphere)
Sex Type Thing - Checked Up By Time (2011)
1 comment:
Jim Rocks!
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