Hark – Machinations

Hark – Machinations

Season Of Mist – 2017

Hard Rock, Sludge, Stoner

Rated: *****

There is an elephant in the room and I will address it straight away. Hark reviews seem to always have the phrase “owing much to Baroness and Mastodon”. Well, yeah. Prog-sludge and riffage certainly did get a kick up the arse when these two bands got going and a lot of people found a direction into which their creative ideas could solidify into a heavy mess of power… but… I thought the last two Baroness albums felt weak. Mastodon appear to be on auto-pilot. (Please do not send in comments telling me how wrong I am. One of the luxuries of freelancing means that Joop has to be the reasonable face of his blog. I, on the other hand, care not one jot about upsetting sensitive readers!) Hark are going their own way and are all the better for it. Taking the best of the 70’s – Iommi & Page – and incorporating it with the aggression and single vision of today, their sound is a furious steamroller of power and riffs that rocks like a bastard on fire. When people not soiled by contact with the swampy underground that we all dwell in ask what it is that I could possibly listen to that gets me so excited, I will play them this, screaming “Listen you weak puny fools, blindly consuming music that has been spoon-fed into your lives by the media – This is real music, played by real people – what you hear as noise and aggression is the sound in my head being realized into fuzzed waves of sounds that set me alive for some brief moments of clarity before the crushing reality of life brings me down again.” Or in other words, this album fucking slays!

(Written by Tony Maim)

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