Customer Reviews

Alter

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A true masterpiece. Pleasure Forever is a band that can not be easily classified, and thank god. Beautiful paino, chaotic dissadent guitar and complex precussion, create one of the richest soundscapes I have ever heard out of a three piece. So many great songs on this album, at least half you will find yourself humming at one time or another. The lyrics are dark, but well written, not chessy or cliché. These guys definitly pray to the alter of the doors, zepplin, while not forgetting their punk/hardcore roots. I was a huge fan of the last album and this blows it out of the water....Buy it...You won't be dissappointed

Few records can bring the indie slacksters, metal-heads and goth kids together for a listening session in the back parking lot, but Pleasure Forever's sophomore album would be the perfect choice should someone attempt such a summit. On Alter, the San Francisco trio combines driving guitar with noir-ish piano vamps and wraps the whole thing in an artsy darkness. The results are far more interesting than one might imagine, revealing an album that is imminently accessible yet refreshingly unpredictable.

The album's double entendre title successfully encapsulates the nature of a band that slides between genres and embraces elements of the occult. Song titles like "Czarina", "Aeon Flame", or "This is the Zodiac Speaking" read like the minutes of a Wicca meeting and suggest the band may be distant kin to Billy Corgan. Indeed, if you crossed the most metallic moments of the Smashing Pumpkins with the Black Heart Procession, you'd get Pleasure Forever.

The juxtaposition of these styles makes listeners unsure which half is the guilty pleasure: the Nirvana-inducing blast of tracks like "Axis Exalt" or the campy black cabaret of songs like "Tempest II." But there is more than enough here for everybody, so don't be surprised if this one blows up later this year.

Barin McGrath
Junkmedia.org