album review
No playing it safe Dead Sons
The Hollers And The Hymns "Sheffield, I suppose, could justly claim to be called the ugliest town in the Old World." once said the world-famous novelist and journalist, George Orwell. However, for the musical world, Sheffield is beautiful, a source of some of the finest musicians around. Pulp, The Human League, Richard Hawley, Rolo Tomassi, Def Leppard, Arctic Monkeys for example, and although you may not appreciate all those bands, you can’t say Sheffield is a one-genre-wonder. This is where we meet Dead Sons. They have broken out of the Sheffield music scene with slick riffs and abusive drumming and they’re not going to stop. Desert rock is not something you associate with England. In fact you really only associate it with a small area in southern California located not too far away from the Coachella valley. However with the huge success of Queens Of The Stone Age and the Arctic Monkey’s heavily-influenced third album Humbug, us English are getting used to the intoxicating romance between blues, heavy rock and psychedelia that comes together perfectly in desert rock. Dead Sons pull off this tricky genre fantastically. 'The Hollers and The Hymns' is the eerily-named debut album from Dead Sons, and the title is not where the eeriness stops. The whole album feels like, in the best possible way, a trip around the London Dungeons. You are there to enjoy yourself, and yet at the back of your mind, for some reason, fear is taking over. The album starts big, gets bigger. To begin an album with just feedback of a guitar, reminiscent of being at a gig when the band just walks on, is brave. There isn’t a slow build up, the whole band kick in at once and without time to think you’re being taken on this journey with the band. 'Ghost Train' is a fast, swirling mix of scratchy guitars, big drums and cool-apocalyptic lyrics. 'Shotgun Woman', the second track on the record, carrying on with the fast pace and it is a clear single choice for the band, it was released back in 2011 and went to number 2 in Turkey, apparently. Not only do the lyrics have you chanting along on the bus (yes, this happened) but in two minutes and thirty-nine seconds they get across exactly who and what Dead Sons are. They’re a no-messing Rock 'n' Roll band from the (not so) glamourous Sheffield and they’re here to make some noise. The use of the rock organ is key, after all no desert rock album is complete without one and it certainly adds to the creepiness of this album. The vocals sound incredibly similar to Alex Turner, so much so I was scouring the internet to find out if he’d made a guest appearance. As far as I’m aware he hasn’t, this is a Sheffield band making desert rock though, you see the similarities? It’s not a bad thing to be compared to Arctic Monkeys, they’re one of Britain’s most loved and most successful bands for quite some time. However it will put some people off which is a shame as they’re is as much different as there is similar between the two bands.