Wild Eyes - Above Becomes Below

  by Paul Waller

published: 19 / 11 / 2014

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Review

With one look at this album’s cover, you can tell exactly what this band are going to sound like. The four members appear to have fallen out of their shabby touring van, a haze of smoke drifts skywards from an open door; the three ‘gentlemen’ sport varying degrees of facial hair styles and the girl (she has to be the vocalist, right?) holds her head in her hand, dazed. Welcome to stoner rock 2014 style. Now recently, Sweden’s Blues Pills have broken through the bloated hard/blues rock market. It’s probable that they did so thanks to singer Elin Larsson’s charismatic stage presence and belting voice. The music is a so/so take on the Zeppelin blueprint, but then again what would you really be expecting anyway? Well, Wild Eyes are the Californian take on Blues Pills. But this time the vocals are not so overbearing that the rest of the band seem irrelevant. In fact Janiece Gonzalez has been placed so perfectly in the mix that during the final track ‘Hewn Runes’ the voice comes across as another instrument filling the void where a fuzzed-up guitar solo wouldn’t dare go, weaving its way through the hectic instrumentation and whilst it never overpowers the band you get the feeling that live that voice would be the very thing that could hold a jaded audience captive. This self-titled debut lays a solid enough foundation but I would have liked to have seen a little more exploration from the band. The 7 minute 20 second long ‘The Freak’ is the only song here that really delivers the goods. More like this and Blues Pills may find that they are no longer the shot in the arm that blues fuelled stoner rock fans need. Where Wild Eyes will take their music next could well put pay to that.

Track Listing:-

1 Stiff Nights
2 Snakey Lady
3 Plenty Good Lovin'
4 The Freak
5 Alabaster Dream
6 Hewn Runes

Band Links:-

https://www.facebook.com/WildEyesSF

Label Links:-

http://www.heavypsychsounds.com/
https://www.facebook.com/HEAVYPSYCHSOU
https://twitter.com/HEAVYPSYCHSOUND
https://www.youtube.com/user/MonoStere
https://instagram.com/heavypsychsounds