Quiet Loudly | Soulgazer

FRESH BAKED
in NYC
Quiet Loudly
Soulgazer
2009 | BNS Sessions
B

On the first track off Quiet Loudly’s new album Soulgazer, a playful guitar interlude is followed by a Crazy Horse-like sludgefest. The next track “Lift this Mountain” plays with the same guitar stylings, but this time Buckley-esque vocals are accompanied by an organ and washes of blues distortion. This eight-minute-plus journey even pulls out the brass to battle it out over some hi-gain scale work and riffage galore. Spare a few shorter songs scattered throughout the album, like “Mountain,” most tracks are well over five minutes – the band seems to find its groove best in lengthy, improvised allusions based around one or two deliberate and effective chord structures. Despite the shoegaze tag floating around some of their promotional material, this album is all soul blues, never more evident than on “Church of Mud,” which finds singer Max Goransson writhing in agony against those spectral organs and horns until more heavy guitar play eventually closes the song.

Moonlighting bass player Tony Aqullino and drummer Sal Garro hold down their parts in loose but exemplary fashion, tacking on arrangements that support the weight of Max’s heavy and often pentatonic overdriven guitar stabs. Above all, it’s the brass that takes the album into more interesting territory, especially on a song like “Miner for a Heart of Space,” a harmonica and sax-heavy take on a Neil Young dirge. The over-ten-minute closer, “I Gave Her the Ocean,” gets at the heart of what Quiet Loudly is all about. The guitar gives a bluesier J. Mascis feel and then the vocals enter against the backbeat, only to be enveloped again in washes of noise, dynamically brought back down to nothing, and then repeated again. At seven minutes in, after a shredding solo, straight-up vocals against a drum beat are followed by another solo, this time from the harmonica, before closing down with a poignant, yet simple guitar line.

Soulgazer, released this spring on BNS Sessions, takes a journey into noise rock combated against the more plaintive side of blues. It seems that the band has taken its moniker and branded a sound completely around it.

You can stream tracks from Soulgazer at Quiet Loudly’s Myspace.

by Gordon Sharp