Our Tracks of the Week have just been delivered on a viking longboat made of iron and powered by explosions. We hope you enjoy their lusty roar.
Mount Holly - It Ain’t Easy This takes a while to get going (the vocal doesn’t start until the two minute mark), but when it does, gadzooks! It’s the kind of blues Zeppelin used to play when they were doing things like Since I’ve Been Lovin’ You, all moody and epic and full of trouser thrust. Mount Holly used to be the Nick Perri Group, and Nick Perri used be in Silvertide, and we liked Silvertide until it all went quiet.
Toto - Burn Starting with a nice lilting piano part before some rattling, distant drums loom over the horizon and a chorus crashes in like a prairie storm, Burn is strong. And, just as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti, the album from whence it comes is also strong. TOTO XIV might just end up in some end-of-year lists, that’s all we’re saying.
The November Five - A Little Knowledge “We are Godzilla, you are Tokyo.” Wow, that’s some statement. Smooshing the swagger of Pretty Things with the grit of The Godfathers, London four-piece The November Fire are back with this new single (out Monday) and a mini tour - looping through Holloway Road, Bournemouth, Birmingham, Sheffield and finishing in the mighty Walthamstow - starting this very evening! Lorks!
Elder - Compendium According to Classic Rock’s design honcho James “James” Isaacs, Elder have “emerged from the stoner primordial ooze” with this track, and he’s an expert. All we know is that we listened, and after the noodly bit at the beginning that sounds a bit like King Crimson, there arrived a riff so heavy our brains actually burst.
Holy Serpent — Shroom Doom More hot primordial action as Holy Serpent arise from their basket of psilocybin devilry and issue forth a riff so demented we had to call the authorities just to keep ourselves safe from harm. Holy Serpent are from Melbourne, where, our sources tell us, mushroom season is likely to begin in late April.
And So I Watch You From Afar - Wasps This Northern Irish mob just keep getting bigger-sounding and better. The ‘buzz’ (snigger) on Wasps is it’s technoflash meets opera, like an instrumental Muse on steroids. Yes, that good. Watch the horizon for new album Heirs, due May 4.
Devil’s Train - Down On You We’ve featured Devil’s Train before, and now they’re back with a pair of Dodge Chargers, a girl with an angle-grinder, some faux-lesbian action and a riff that thumps so hard it can only have been composed by a tractor. If you loved the unreconstructed 80s, you’ll find much here to enjoy.
ARO - Raining Gold We’re putting this here for curiosity’s sake, as ARO is none other than Aimee “No, I won’t appear in your TV show” Osbourne, daughter of Ozzy. Raining gold is atmospheric noir-hop (we just made that up), like Lana Del Rey if she’d grown up watching horror films. And perhaps she did. The video is a clever, one-shot thing full of corpses.
