I Am Low – Úma

 

 

I Am Low – Úma
Majestic Mountain Records – 2023
Rock, Stoner, Grunge, Alternative
Rated: ****

I love that opening Gunman track on the new I Am Low album! But the Swedish three deliver more than just that wild opening track on their new album called Úma. Released tomorrow, it sports nine tracks that all have their dynamic energy throughout the tracks themselves but delivers even more in that respect when it comes to the album itself. Where Gunman already glides through many different sections, it still an alternative nineties reminiscent, grunge and early stoner rocking, err, rocker. Gunman has glints of Filter, Alice In Chains, Nirvana but also Queens of The Stone Age. It bursts out of the gate and will immediately take hold and won’t let go. The perfect opener, and we thank them once again for not making it a single. (As you know, we love it when an opening track is still a mystery upon actual release.) And that end section, how it seems to whirl around you like a grungy hurricane, amazing! Offering up proof for those high dynamics on the album, is the second song (and single) Dead Space. A slow grooving rocker, that has you cloud surfing in no time. Psychedelically enticing, highly atmospheric, yet also very grounded whenever the ‘space’ vocals seem to swerve around you. Following Ruins, short of two minutes, rams your like a rock’n roll, grunge, punk cyclone, battering you from all sides. Bass heavy Wake is allowed to meander before turning into a rapid filled thundering river full of waterfalls and that almost yammering touch in the vocals seems to drag you along towards a misty shore where some kind of dream seems to lie in wait. Title track Úma follows, which show cases their talent for letting loose, letting things hang, sounds slowly morph into something else, as if you are still drifting along that river from Wake, but suddenly, and for a long time it has turned into a much calmer section. The repeated vocals will not hypnotize you or put you under, there is once again that drawl, but it means something for the vocalist, and you can feel its earnest. After this halfway mark, Pigs follows and moves back towards the more direct nineties alternative and grunge touched rocking. But this time around their drums become even more choppy, the riffs edgier and the bass muddier. And those final three songs go through even more slow-moving dynamics, with Time using the guitar even more as a story telling device, Void a trance inducing cosmic stare and Release the combination of both and offering indeed, some sort of release. If only because that final guitar line and slide says so…

(Written by JK)

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