Streams

Follow-up to the debut album "Shores", this album continues in a more punk-influenced and slightly less BM-oriented direction. The BM elements are most apparent in the guitar work which can still be pretty buzzy but the jangly effect has gone. One positive change is in the singing which is now much more assured and has a distinct style: the guy still can't sing that great and the singing is often half-spoken but at least he consistently hits the right notes and he's experimenting more with what his voice can do. Of course, this does mean the Homer Simpson quality has gone which robs the album of the whimsy and eccentricity the first album has.

All the songs are good though they no longer have very catchy tunes so only a few stick out despite the duo changing musical style from one track to the next. The opener "Wounds Are so Indifferent" has a brief stormy intro that is wiped out quickly by the song proper; the singer makes a valiant stab at singing near the upper end of his range. This song, like many of the others, is riff-driven with minimal repetitive melodies and drumming that while good, isn't very much out of the ordinary. Even so, the duo have a great driving sound and the guitars, when they go vibrato and acquire a hive-of-hornets sound, have a really menacing air as demonstrated on early tracks like "Streams to Depression" and the rock-n-roll "The Rotten Temple" (notable for growling vocals). Moving along, "The End" - no, we haven't moved that far, this song is actually only halfway through! - is an acoustic guitar piece which is a bit on the cringeworthy side but you gotta applaud the guys for attempting something out of their comfort zone. "Timbre Noir pt 3", following on from part 2 on "Shores", is an all-instrumental BM fuzz guitar piece which isn't quite as fuzzy and stormy as part 2 but at least puts the fellas back where we like 'em. On "Chained Howl", the guys use a slightly different vocal technique - it sounds a weeny bit like the singing on the late 1970s UK band This Heat's first album which was reissued last year - to fit in with the song's lazy loping, almost-collapsing drunken structure. The musicians play as though they're fighting through a thick fog of a hangover in their heads and towards the end the singing gets really falsetto and faint. This is the obvious highlight of the entire record!

"Visions of the Dead Serpent" is our duo on autopilot for a while until they wake up enough to do that strummy wobbling high-pitched lead guitar bit; from then on the song improves with some genuinely vicious singing (including some roars!) and more passages of quivering BM guitar. "Anonym", the second all-acoustic guitar piece and also all-instrumental, has the only really memorable melody on the album but it is so repetitive that it seems just like a tape loop. What a waste. Outro track "Song of Silence" is the fuzziest and doomiest song, very similar in some ways to the last track on "Shores", with some distorted deep growling alongside the deadpan singing.

Originally I had intended just to point out a few tracks I thought were the best but I was listening to the album while writing this review fairly loudly so I obviously zoned right into it. The first few times I heard "Streams", it didn't strike me as very outstanding compared to "Shores" so I suppose if I hadn't known that album, "Streams" might have made more of an impression on me. Just goes to show when you review something by a band whose other stuff you've heard before, all that history comes to bear on what you write to the extent you may be unaware that you're not being objective or fair to the item under review. Overall, C of O have done an efficient job in creating another garage punk / BM fusion album and you can hear they have grown more confident in what they do (especially in the singing) even though the result is not as off-beat as you'd like. The guys could very well be moving in a post-BM direction; if they do, they'll need more distinctive melodies to compensate for the lessening BM influence.

The best tracks are "The Rotten Temple" and "Chained Howl". I'm not too sure about "The End", I feel quite embarrassed for the guys but maybe with time I'll accept it and even think it's quite good. That's how it is with such a strongly idiosyncratic band like Circle of Ouroborus!