Artist: Storms
Label: Moonlee Records
Release: 2011
Length: 33:35
Rating: 3/5
Storms is a young band from Croatia in terms of origin, but its lineup is seasoned, bringing together under one roof musicians who once made music in bands including Don’t Mess With Texas, Amok, Nikad, Radio Free Isaac and Lunar.
The studio debut “We Are Storms”, partly previewed by last year’s “Demo” with three tracks, Gutless, Mount Manhattan and Hope Of Hype, is a reflection of the trio’s past musical endeavors. It’s a stripped-down version of post rock, laced with punk rock and hardcore influences, with a “bare,” lively and warm-sounding production, you could call it a proper “indie” sound, one with none of the annoying harshness, which instead massages your eardrums pleasantly throughout, in just the right dose. In expressive terms, Storms aren’t bringing any new musical revolution or anything adventitious with their debut, which, let’s be honest, the post rock genre, at least in the general sense, can leave wide open. The experimentation and pleasant surprises typical of their Zagreb compatriots Man Zero just aren’t here, and with Storms you’ll look in vain for even the faintest trace of musical “quirkiness.” If we’re splitting hairs, the most movement in how a song develops comes from the closing The Bitter End, where the drums finally grab some attention too, bringing more explosiveness at the spots where the transitions happen.
The songs are short, compact and built on trivial templates, and “We Are Storms” spins through in a good half hour. For a musical statement, in Storms’ case, that’s plenty. The four-four bars in repeated guitar phrases resting on simple rhythmic textures do add that hypnotic effect, but it sneaks in behind the more directly exposed guitar noise (which makes sense, as that’s its job, filling most of the overall sound picture of the songs), so on first listen the mood feels heavier than you’d expect from post rock. Still, those feelings deepen with further spins of the album, so even this element, though somewhat hidden at first, is by no means missing.
Since this is a trio that doesn’t use any extra sonic effects, like layering samples into the sound, adding a blanket of keyboards or additional sub-rhythmic textures, the main load of filling out the sound falls on the guitar. So the songs are mostly built so that extra guitar embellishments stretch over the main guitar phrase, taking over the role of the vocals. Nineteen Eighty Bore, which opens the album, is the opening example of this principle. There’s also a clear integration of dissonance, which comes from the punk tradition and which alternative rock culture, in its present-day forms, is fashionably saturated with.
Storms are, expressively speaking, branded as a trivial and easily accessible form of post rock, but at the same time their compositions prove that they’re not short on ideas for setting up effective guitar phrases and, as a result, lead motifs. The album follows the proven Storms formula, while the band manages to define a set of ten songs that differ from one another enough in their motifs for the album to reach a pleasing level of dynamic development. So any fear that “We Are Storms” might happen to bore you is completely unnecessary, a futile thought.
You can feel in the playing that the musicians have a good stretch of musical road behind them. The album has a live feel to the performance, as if it were played the old-school way. A gig in the studio, in other words. And given the band’s musical character, that’s really the most Storms can offer in this sound production. At the same time, the guys liven up the songs here and there with calmer passages, or the repetition of phrases in the noise slowly builds, then fades again at another point (To Hell In A Handbag, I’ll Be Damned)). That’s the wave effect, and the resulting sense of hypnosis, creeping into the very fabric of the songs.
“We Are Storms” is a very good studio debut, pleasantly executed for the ears of a wider circle of listeners who get their kicks from alternative sonic solutions. It’s a successful and bold culmination of three musical worlds, embodied by three musicians, in a new musical body. How much of the elementary will be “sacrificed” in the future on the strength of daring experimentation is impossible to predict, but at its core the band’s studio debut is a decently delivered and pleasantly post-rock shaped product. Let’s just hope the band doesn’t turn into a self-replicator down the road.
Lineup
Sasha – guitar
Slobich – bass guitar
Neven – drums
Production
Storms
Track list
1. Nineteen Eighty Bore(03:35)
2. Up the Punks, Fuck the Drunks (02:32)
3. Mount Manhattan(02:53)
4. I Am Vile (03:36)
5. To Hell in a Handbag 04:02)
6. Gutless (02:55)
7. Heroine (04:09)
8. Hope Or Hype (03:12)
9. I’ll Be Damned (03:10)
10. The Bitter End(03:24)
