Review: St?ner Kebab “Chapter Zero” CD

As the terrible, terrible, terrible band name suggests, here we have some stoner rock from this Italian outfit who takes a slightly different road that still wears their influences proudly. "Cop Song" starts off and is basically an instrumental with nothing but some droning "ahhh-ahhh-ahhh-ahhh" vocals that all sort of sounds like a groovier take on Sabbath worship with some reverberated clean passages for contrast. "Amazing Aurakaria" is a succinct piece that opens with arpeggiated clean guitars and bluesy lead licks before cranking into a fairly typical 70's influenced stoner rock groove complete with lots of noisy lead work and gruff singing. Like the first track, but to a lesser degree, I'm not really fond of the vocals as his voice seems to waver just enough to lack the confidence it needs to be convincing. The filter over the singing in "The March of the Yellow Lizard" helps a bit, but... I think these guys would actually be better as an instrumental band since the vocals almost always seem like an afterthought, and the band seems more at home when noodling around with corrosive lead textures over twisted feedback or pummeling the listener with gritty stoner rock/sludge rhythms. "Saint George" even brings in some slide guitar at the start, and feels the most like a concrete song as far as its actual structure goes, which could be promising given a little more work on the vocals and the overall force of the riffs. After the last track there's a long span of dead air before some clean guitars return for a more chilled out instrumental passage with some tribal sounding percussion or something in the distance alongside the subdued beats of a traditional kit, which continues for seven minutes or so. The recording's pretty good though, I will admit. I'm a big fan of the thick, warm bass tone, the percussion sounds crisp and natural, and the guitars are ultra thick and gritty. The only significant complaint I have is that the output levels start to get too loud and cave in to faint distortion, which is possibly a mastering issue, but it's always at the hands of the guitars and creates a pretty annoying distraction whenever it occurs, so they should watch out for that in the future. There are also a few gaps in the mix that should be attended to, but other than these hindrances the tones are actually really good, so they're near the mark there. The layout's not that great either, but I do like the way that the booklet folds out from the center, and you can actually turn the booklet upside down and fold the flaps out from either side to get two different versions of the front cover. No lyrics are included and the song titles, which are also goofy, are really hard to get a grasp on since they're presented half on the disc face and half underneath the CD tray, so at first I didn't even know if there were song titles at all since I had already put the CD in the stereo. I don't know, I have a hard time taking this band seriously due to the silly name, but beyond that the songs just don't hold my interest. I'm picky with stoner rock as it is, but... I think these guys need to work on their songwriting a little more in order to really achieve something of interest. I've liked the other releases from Dufresne a lot more than this one.