Labels: Blind Date – Jonson Family – Shifty
Review by: Alex Deller
Having a somewhat love/hate relationship with Dot(.) I didn’t hold out any hopes for this, especially since I’d not particularly rated their previous outing on Blind Date, but here they’ve ditched the slow-motion blues and ill-placed guitar solos for twenty or so minutes’ worth of pure smoke-trailing dirge, pounding away at the same grubby handful of riffs and periodically smearing them with a low, throaty gurgle by way of vocals. This they keep up at a sluggard’s pace, booming down upon you before it all reduces down to a fuzzed-out sonic mulch that seeps steadily into your brain and sends you off into a morbid blank-eyed coma.
As this appears to be a day of redemption it’s fitting, then, that Hey Colossus are up next. My numerous chance encounters with them in a live setting usually involve wanton despair and drunkenly ranting to whoever’s sitting next to me as to why you just can’t play heavy metal on a Telecaster. This track, however, is pretty bloody good. Maybe it’s just the simple fact that, after a dash of nondescript droning and other such muddling around, the band just lock into a good, solid riff and keep thumping away at it until their side of the record is just about to run out, whereupon they briefly lurch into some semi-uptempo riffing before crashing back down into fuzz, feedback and that old familiar riff, providing some suitably shaggy-head closure to a most enjoyable rock-out.