Band of Skulls – Himalayan

Mountain of Sound

British Trio Band of Skulls’ new album Himalayan has just been released. This is the band’s fourth album, however  listening to it now, it’s hard to say that it’s all done by the same band. Himalayan is comprised of songs that range from highly distorted punk songs like “Toreador” to calm melodic tunes such as “Get Yourself Together.”

Half the songs have a male singing while the other half is a female voice. Therefore having multiple genres and multiple lead vocalists in one album causes the listener to question if they’re still listening to the same band. Not to mention the fact that while half of the songs you’d be happy to put on your Ipod, the other half, no one would blame you if you turned them off right away.

The songs that are hardest to listen to are the ones that are heavily distorted because they reach that point where it’s seemingly not just distortion fueled by anger, but rather distortion as a result of “playing with sound.” This ends up just simply being a noisy, headache-inducing mess. On the other hand however, part of the album does have a melodic, jam-band type feel. They aren’t necessarily the songs you would put on repeat, but they do work nicely as something in the background.

It’s easy to say that Band of Skulls put a lot of effort into this album; it’s not something that was thrown together on a whim. However, despite all that hard work, some of it just really didn’t pan out. It seems like if they had just taken the time to focus in on one aspect, it probably would have come out in a nicer way. It’s just that the way it currently is there is too much going on.