REVIEW: Vulture Kult – Don’t Let Rock’n’Roll Ruin Your Life LP
NOTE: Posting has been sporadic. I’m well aware – I do my level best to get around to stuff, but school and work make it touch-and-go sometimes. Thanks to all those who still send me stuff. It will get reviewed, I promise.
ANYWAY! We got sent this from a publicity guy. This time, the ‘sounds like’ area is marginally closer to the truth. Vulture Kult practice a pretty big sounding brand of RAWK. They bill themselves as a two-piece band, but they’ve got a surprisingly expansive sound. There’s a variety of takes on the same style with this record – though some go for a swinging SABBATH groove, and some for a straighter, faster pace, they always hew pretty closely to a 70’s hard rock sound. No complaints over that, for sure. These guys are good musicians, and it comes through without coming across as wanky or show-offy. Guitar work is good, but you won’t find too much in the way of fretboard-burning solos – the guy definitely prefers the lower end of the neck, but he works it, for sure. Blues-rock riffs for days on this thing. There’s hints of BLUE CHEER, I’d say…but a punk influence as well, mostly manifesting in a faster pace, and shorter songtimes.
It’s a tried-and-true formula, and it delivers for Vulture Kult – mostly. Some songs like “Avenue H” come up empty, if only because doing a trick we’ve heard before is only gonna float if the riffs and power are there, and this one just hasn’t got them. Come to think of it, the most accurate thing I can say about this album is that to any listener who’s already heard the musical touchstones, it’s gonna sink or swim in your estimation based on how much you like the riffs – that’s the centerpiece here. “Cyanide Hand Grenades” deliver…”Welcome to the Land of the Dead” and “Movie of Me” are welcome changes of pace, but like some of the other tracks on the album, they can over stay their welcome a bit. They take an interesting turn in the last couple songs, dipping into psychy reverb-laden space drift, but if these were scattered throughout the album, I’d probably be more intrigued…it feels like a strange coda in the current track listing.
With bands like this that focus on the humungo riffs, they either punch you in the nose and are gone, or they have to have enough tricks to keep the intensity up. Vulture Kult does this with equal proportion of hits to misses – I’ll file this under “probably a killer live show.”
LISTEN: Bandcamp
BUY: Vulture Kult
[wax trash] 