From Sheffield, come ones to watch
Billing themselves as groove-laden, riff-drenched, psychedelic heavy blues, this is the second album from Sheffield’s Regulus.
The band themselves reckon that this is the record that has seen them nail down what they wanted as a sound, and listening to the 11 brilliant songs that make up “Quadralith” it’s hard to disagree.
Beginning with the chunky as you like groove of “Dominion” is a masterstroke. Coming on with a fuzzed up thud that could shake the earth, but without sounding like one of the myriad desert rock bands from the US. Instead there is a muscular and very British strong arm feel here.
Nowhere is this better shown than on “Last Chance To Die Young” – party rock, that is if Orange Goblin and Motorhead had a party….and things get very messy indeed, lest the line about “I’ve got some whiskey and I’ve got some speed” is lying to us.
Singer Luke Jennings is a big part of this, gravel throated, he is also one of the bands two guitarists and does a fine job throughout,
It is a work that doesn’t see why it should get too bogged down in expectation, either. “Seven Tales Told” explores the blues in a way that Sabbath might, while the slower, more monolithic “Bones” – with its clever use of female vocals – is a wander off down the more psychedelic roads.
Indeed, it does seem that each song has a different aim, “Heart Of Stone” for example has a heavy southern rock type vibe, but this is far from being a collection that is one of disparate thing that aren’t tied together. Where some albums with work as varied as the primal “The Dream Reaper” would sound like a compilation, “Quadralith” despite its digressions wherever it chooses, is a cohesive record – just one of a band with plenty of ideas they wanted to use.
So it is that “Dead Man’s Grave” offers some sandpaper harmonies, “Dutch” swings and struts, and if you’re going to have an instrumental on the record then make it one like this, and you can almost see the headbanging that would go on in venues up and down the land in “Overcome” and never have the words “dig my own grave” been sung with such downright glee.
Things end with the title track, and it’s the longest – and even for this record – most ambitious cut here. It also gives the album a fitting conclusion. Speaking about the platter that it gives it’s name to, the band said this: “The Quadralith is a metaphor for ourselves, four distinct entities united in one purpose. Where our last album was a collection of songs written over the initial years that we experimented with our sound, “Quadralith” is the product of a band who finally knows exactly who they are and what they want to express”.
That, in a nutshell, is the whole thing nailed. We’ll just add the rather weedy epithet that “Quadralith” is quite superb.
Rating 9/10
