Customer Reviews

Indian Tower

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

On the incredibly special occasion of these guys reuniting for at least one show in Nazareth, PA, I thought I'd write a review of this unfortunately rather obscure record. I don't think nearly enough is made of the unique nature of Pearls and Brass' sound. Yes, the riffs are incredibly dense and have a definite classic stoner rock tone to them at times. But I've never heard the blues played by a math rock outfit, and played with passion, and that's what Indian Tower sounds like. It's quite a quandry - the blues are based on groove and simplicity. The blues is about the feeling of the music. And thunderous blues rock - classic heavy rock and roll - is usually based on a monstrously heavy groove, beaten into you repeatedly until you submit to its hypnotic nature. Math rock of all stripes is about progressive complexity, severe displays of musicianship, shifting time signatures and carefully calculated rhythmic chaos. It is rarely about the groove, and rarely has traditionally defined soul - nor does it need it. On the other hand, rarely does a blues rock record make your head spin with the sheer unpredictability of the riffs from measure to measure. The math rock plus blues equation seems to have no answer. How could it possibly be done well? How can the two sounds be merged effectively? To my knowledge, only one band has ever pulled it off, and it's this little known power trio from Nazareth, PA called Pearls and Brass. If you're looking for a band to compare them to, I can only say it sounds like Cream covering The Melvins. Randall Huth and Joel Winter's riffs ooze with sludgy boogie, and the vocals often evoke a southern rock tinged Jack Bruce character; however, Huth's guitar work is also maddeningly complex and constantly shifting direction, along with Josh Martin's drumming, which effortlessly shifts from deep in the pocket to completely out of control and back again with fluidity rarely matched. Again, I don't know how it's pulled off - it blows my mind with every listen. For that reason alone, this record is timeless in my eyes. What better endorsement can I give? Indian Tower is a hard rock monolith, one of the singularly great achievements in heavy music from the 2000's.

I like this CD. Read about the band in a Magnet (the magazine) feature on new(er) metal bands, so I picked it up and am rocking out. Just a classic metal band with a classic metal sound, nothing out of this world but it works.