ALBUM REVIEWS

Heavy Water Experiments HEAVY WATER EXPERIMENTS INTREPID SOUND RECORDINGS 4.09 @www.vanguard-online.co.uk “Don’t judge a book by the cover”, they tell us. But where would that leave us? Adrift in a sea of confusion, where the skills of semiotics are no guide. And does it apply to CD covers anyway? The cover to Heavy Water Experiments’ self-titled debut is psychedelic, warped and with a typography that screams “we want to mess with your mind”. Lulling us briefly into a sense of security, the album begins all floaty, before kicking in some bone-crunching riffs. Not a metal rifferama, but enough to let us know this is an electric band with noise intentions. Later in the song, as we’ve alternated drifting vocals and distorted bass, they offer us a guitar solo that owes its hypnotically drifting distorted effect to the influence of Neil Young. Other tracks, like Mirror The Sky, aim for an effect a bit like The Beatles “Within You, Without You”, a timeless sense of watching crowds drift on a summer sky. In other words – this is stoner music….. But not Stoner Rock, though rock it is. Rather than the relentless riffing of such bands, this favours a drift, embellished by distorted guitar played exceptionally slowly. In fact the only person I’ve heard play slower is Neil Young and, as Andy Kershaw once observed “you can hear his sideburns growing between notes”. It comes as a surprise to find that this band is a duo and there must be a lot of overdubbing to reach this thick paste of a sound, where the air becomes solid with riffs that hang in the atmosphere, creating a dizzying claustrophobia. Bass is a constant feature and has quite a range (it’s an eight-string) so we get lots of lovely crunchy, rubbery sounds. Ask me to name a track or a tune and I’d struggle, because this is all of a piece, cut from the same roll of cloth. The textures pass from track to track without jarring, setting the album up for a mood piece, an accompaniment, perhaps, to some herbal recreation, though it had a mesmerising and incapacitating effect on me without the aid of any chemical enhancement. Roll another number for the road……. Ross McGibbon www.heavywaterexperiments.com Email Links & Comments to the editor Check the latest album releases