Astraal – Astraal (CD/LP)

Ozium Records has undoubtably a certain knack for finding first rate retro/stoner bands, just like their colleagues at Transubstans. It something of an open grey area between stoner and retro, where the bridge between is often quite wide and you can also find some nuances of doom and sludge and even a drop of classic heavy metal here and there, which shows in the solo section of the opening track “The Watcher” by Swedish debutants Astraal. Astraal is a four-piece consisting of Joel Edvardsson (guitar), Joel Jansson (drums), Emil Haraldsson (vocals/guitar) and Jonathan Holmström (bass). Apart from an annoyingly loud and sharp kick drum and relatively quiet toms, the sound is fat and good! “Man of Nothing” gave me immediate Tony Iommi vibes, even if the song itself wasn’t Black Sabbath material. “Yesterday’s Dream” steamrolls on in the same vein, at times it actually reminds me a bit of Saint Vitus, especially in the way the singer sometimes follows the guitar riffs. Too bad about that annoying kick drum, though. What I like about the songs is that there’s stuff happening. A lot of bands in this genre, find a cool riff and then they just keep sticking to that same riff, with a slight variation here and there, but generally just mowing on. Astraal ad a lot of nice dynamics and they’re not afraid of adding other parts or tempos to mix it up a bit. “Chasing The Sun” takes the tempo down again, into the doom areans. Heavy, slow and with cool Geezer Butler:ish bass playing, but still keeping a good pace. F***ing kick drum!! Really cool and playful chorus! ”Walls Of Whisper” starts off with drums (not sure if I pointed this out before, but those drums don’t sound good at all!), reinforced with a pleasantly distorted bass, and then the guitars barge in! Another doom-oriented track. The album ends with “The River That Runs”, another kinda drony number, however, not doom at all, but more modern sort of ambient metal, a bit like Poison Black meets Paradise Lost. What I do like about it is that they don’t go all goth on it, but the vocals actually lift up the track. A nice debut indeed!

Janne Stark

Year: 2021

Label: Ozium