Musical tags can often be misleading especially when browsing the pages of sites such as Bandcamp, Spotify,and Deezer . You can spend ages looking for something in a certain genre only to find a band, tagged as being in that genre, are something completely different to what they are tagged as. However this is not the case with Australian groovsters Dirty Pagans new album "Volume1". The legend tucked beneath the new albums page tags the band as occult. doom metal, hard rock, heavy metal, psych and stoner rock... and they are all of them!!
"Volume 1" begins with the sound of a stylus being laid on to vinyl and that brief crackling noise we all remember hearing before our favourite tunes erupted from our speakers, and like those favourite tunes of yesteryear first song "Armour of Satan" does indeed erupt, blowing out your eardrums with gnarled proto-doom riffage that begins with a brief nod to Sabbath's "War Pigs" then moves into its own grizzled stoner doom groove before easing off the accelerator and getting down, low and slow when the vocals finally make an appearance. Here is where we come to what sets Dirty Pagans apart from others ploughing similar musical furrows, Dirty Pagans don't take the road trodden by many of their contemporaries by just coating their grooves in gritty, half growled, half roared vocal dynamics, though they do utilise this style (among many others), they also go to the other extreme with rock god like vocal pyrotechnics soaring over swathes of crunching riffage and constantly shifting pulverising rhythms, in other words old school metal vocals applied to new school grooves. Each of the five songs on "Volume 1", "Armour of Satan","The Man Who Killed The Gods", "Visions","Down Below" and "Love In Your Eyes", feels like a mini rock opera with the band seamlessly criss-crossing across a variety of metal genres and sub-genres, cleverly blending elements of late 70's early 80's heavy metal thunder with a myriad of modern metal and hard rock styles to create an album that in Desert Psychlist's humble opinion is utterly mindblowing.
Check it out ...
© 2018 Frazer Jones
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