(Orange)

I guess calling your band Toke ensures that you’ll forever be pigeonholed as stoner rock and that your mum won’t come to any of your shows. I don’t know if the 3 members of Toke cared about that when they recorded (Orange), particularly seeing as I can’t even find the bandmembers surnames on MA. In essence, Toke sound how you’d expect, just a little heavier, some added weight on the guitar and extra punch in the drums leaving no doubt that the North Carolinans play metal. A guest appearance from Troy Medlin of Sourvein (sludge bastards with influence in the NOLA scene) confirms the fact that this second album comes across more misanthropic and paranoid than buzzing and chilled out.

Vocalist Bronco forms a large part of the vibe, howling out his lyrics about death, struggle, and sickness like the convenience store is shut and he wants whisky and food for his hash headache. Seriously, the first lyric of the album goes “Break both their ankles / Then both their legs.” As such, not being a weed guy myself, I’m not really sure if you could play this while getting stoned, because wouldn’t it just make you freak out to hear a guy screaming at you while playing slightly menacing swampy riffs? From a purely musical perspective, I like (Orange) pretty well, bass interplaying tightly with that thick guitar and setting up several rolling grooves per track, though it’s true I’ve heard this stuff quite a lot before. Not quite as heavy as Weedeater, Toke do a decent job at the same sort of consonant sludge as 16, which can be without flavour at times.

To provide some perspective, my favourite track of the 6 on offer is probably ‘Weight of the World’, which rolls in on a steady riff and allows drums to power the verses, adding little portions of lead guitar a couple of times. The solos aren’t wigged out wah-wah noise, but actually a repeat of the same lead, so it sticks in the memory quickly, as is the case with (Orange) in general, nothing proving too complex. At the meagre length of 24 minutes, however, it seems the weed made Toke lazy, since another couple of tracks would have added more than bulk to the album if they had a different take on the simple formula. All the same, this isn’t bad, just nothing special.