Dark Red – "Tara/She's Laughing At Me" – Beehive Recording Company
One of the more recent groups streaming/spinning online from the celebrated local internet-label, (Beehive), is a smoothly searing super fuzz affair from dynamic duo Dark Red.
The sparse principals: -guitar, -drums, -vocals -and an impressive deck of pedals, (particularly that delay) are enough to affect substantially poignant, head-swimming, ambient drifts (“She’s Laughing At Me” (video)).
Dark Red’s dazzle is very subtle, (on this record, at least, as they can be quite a
feedback firestorm in a live setting); the beats are mere steady struts with tasteful shakers on “Tara” while the guitar doesn't start its characteristic rough-hewn riffing until the halfway point, content to strum and slide along a bass-booming low end under not-so-distorted, yet still-echo-heavy vocals. Dark Red have never
toed too definitively into either psychedelia, glam, noise or shoegaze and the delineation remains pleasingly multifaceted on these tracks.
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...And then there's the splendid squalls of Sros Lords
Sros Lords – "Evil Spawn / The End" – Urinal Cake Records
Hollow, thundering drums, fuzz-splattered guitar groans and wayward UFO organs that yowl right alongside that quavering affectation upon the vocals as it chants, repetitively over buzzing riffs that (Sros Lords) are gonna save your soul, just in time before the world ends.
(Listen: "The End").
The ominous Sci-fi aesthetic continues on the hair-raising “Evil Spawn,” with drums spilled all around as the guitars spit venom. Splendid and sinister sounding organs creep along with bent-up tones while those vocals, almost affecting a British metal-balladeers chilly sneer, lock into the tumbling cadence of the drums.
