Scissorfight "Potential New Agent for Unconventional Warfare" CD
[Tortuga]
Hot damn... these New Hampshire boys are rockin' harder with every release. And by harder I do not mean heavier... I mean harder. This shit is rock, and it rocks hard. End of story. Like their last full-length this is a more diverse effort than some of their earlier work, this time adding in even more use of singing vocals, tons of blazing blues-based solos, some nice 70's sounding dual guitar harmonies, etc. And of course the killer drumming and solid riffing that they've always offered up is present here, driving the vast majority of the material. Many of the tracks are succinct in length, notably the somewhat discordant/twisted "Running the Risk of Raining Buffalo" at less than two minutes and the barely longer "Harvester" - complete with deep spoken vocals, intricate rock riffing, tons of changes, and a little bit of melody. They definitely put a lot into each song, no matter how brief. The production is thick and warm, as it should be. The guitars aren't that heavy, they're gritty and textured with just the right amount of fuzziness, and the bass is suffocatingly thick so it adds plenty of low-end. The percussion sounds totally natural, which is awesome, and the vocals are right in the heart of it all. I have no quarrels here. The layout is all tripped out with psychedelic imagery and colors/patterns on a high gloss paper that has a big time 70's vibe going on. There's no text on the front cover or the outer panels of the booklet at all, but the lyrics and some other tiny text appears inside on the center panels. The lyrics seem shorter and more cryptic this time around: "Drive to survive, It makes no difference anyway, Ride the trip inside, Leave the highways up in flames, Blood on the road, And the road is on fire, Drive the ocean tide, The tide's gonna take me anyway, Collide with the mountainside, Ride all night never hit the brakes." At the end of the disc after some blank space there's a bunch of babble where someone's in the studio trying to say something in a foreign language, which goes on for fuckin' four minutes, in which time I'd have preferred to hear another real song, but whatever. The five tracks and about 13 minutes of actual music on this puppy rock, so fuck it. (8/10)
Running time - 13:00 (approximately), Tracks: 5
[Notable tracks: Hex, Running the Risk of Raining Buffalo, Harvester]
Tortuga Recordings - http://www.tortugarecordings.com

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