After two years existing only as an independent self-release on vinyl, Attalla’s self-titled first album is finally available in CD, cassette and digital format through Shadow Kingdom Records. The band’s fans may well be asking what took so long for a label to finally notice Attalla, and after hearing the album myself I’m asking the same question too. With one foot deep in punk and hardcore and the other foot in Black Sabbath / retro-1970s hard rock territory, this recording blisters with power, steel and aggression.

The album isn’t long and the songs don’t go much beyond five minutes each with maybe one exception. The one-word song titles are very cryptic and might describe stages of being during a drug trip – or a trip through this album if heard loudly enough that listeners are all but engulfed in the music. The music is hard-hitting with chunky, crunchy riffs and punching skins work that could chop through several wooden boards at once. Much of the music is instrumental with great oily and sinister lead guitar melodies unfurling and undulating over the growling, booming bass drones and stuttery drums. An early highlight is the mostly instrumental “Haze” which appropriately befuddles the mind with riffs and rhythms that crush all resistance and lead guitar that’s truly on fire. Attalla (the band) leave no time for us travellers to recover before launching into the even heavier “Lust” and the Sabbath-influenced doomster “Thorn” which features some really sinuous riffing. “Veil” starts as a straight-out rock’n’roller which can be a little jarring after the previous two monster-truck tracks but once it finds its true sludge doom identity, it settles down and coasts steadily along.

The only major problem I have with this album, and which I think most other listeners will agree with, is that lead vocalist Cody Stieg can be a bit lost in this massive monstrous music with his high-pitched shouty singing. Since most normal human singers will have trouble competing with the music anyway, I’d suggest a vocal style that’s more spoken or chanted than sung, and given a moment or two to shine on its own, a cappella style, on future work should the band wish to continue the same way as on “Attalla”. Listen to a track like “Thorn” where Stieg has a lot to get off his chest and you can hear he’s really straining at the high end of his vocal range. Apart from the singing, I can’t find much to fault with the music though perhaps on some songs the drumming sounds more tinny and clacky than it should.

On the whole “Attalla” is a solid effort with lots of catchy hooks, the phattest of phat riffs and more bass-heavy crusherama than a concrete building waiting to be hit by a wrecking ball. Every song sounds just about right for its length, neither too short nor too long though some listeners might wish that “Haze” and “Thorn” were a bit (or even a lot!) longer. Short though it is, this album is a very satisfying crunchy breakfast introduction to a band who we should all hope will have a long and successful future with its fusion of retro hard rock and doom with a hardcore edge.

A surprisingly lively and fresh recording of retro-doom metal is this offering from the aptly named Blizaro, the one-man project of John Gallo who mixes analog synthesiser melodies, organ, traditional melodic doom and cinematic background music elements together with a dash of tongue-in-cheek humour. Amusingly the CD is divided into two parts, the first labelled “(Physical)” and the second part called “(Mental)”: I assume these labels are not references to forms of torture. There is so much joy to be had from this album that it seems much, much more than its 62-minute playing time and many listeners may be shocked to hear that it is nearly all the work of one person. Only one track, “Mental Disease Overture”, features help from two other musicians.

The CD blusters into action with the title track and what a piece it is: very lively and full of bravado with plenty of variety in the melodies and music. Tracks to watch out for include “Midnight Lurkers” (repeating guitar riffs of sheer sombre majestic quality that a million Sabbath wannabee bands would die for), “Castle of Darkness” (creepy synth aligned with acid guitar riffs), “Violet Cosmos” (a spacey wash-out ambient piece), “Catacomb Man” (a Frankenstein mishmash of burpy synth loop, organ sermons, creeped-out cavern atmosphere, syrupy washes and guitar fiddling among other things), “Portallucination” (treated vocals meet haunted-house keyboard melodies) and “Mental Disease Overture” (straight doom metal with a heavy, raw jagged edge and a washed-out vocal). Fans of Black Sabbath will note Gallo’s frail-prophet-in-the-wilderness singing owes a debt to Ozzy Osbourne himself. One notes also that track titles like “Ceremonial Bone Ritual” suggest a love for corny B-grade European art-house horror flicks rampant with sexy lesbian vampires, sacrifices of teenage virgins and scenes of too much gratuitous nudity. It would be very easy for Gallo to have delivered an album oozing with more cheese than Mouse Heaven but fortunately many tracks have a genuinely sinister atmosphere behind the apparent kitsch. It’s not unusual for songs to continually build up on one another, never letting go of listeners and revealing new terrors. “Relief” is not a word in Gallo’s dictionary!

Several songs like “Island of the Dead” are creepy and atmospheric enough that if Gallo so desired, he could remix them into mini-movie soundtracks. What movies could be made out of them, the mind all but boggles at: flicks about serial killers, vampires on the rampage, dissolute rich kids playing at pagan sacrifice and discovering the being they’re pretending to worship is for real and isn’t just joking, survivors of a plane crash stuck on an island populated by cannibals suffering from a rabies epidemic … people these days just don’t make movies like these any more.

This homage to Black Sabbath (the band) and “Black Sabbath” (the Mario Bava movie) was a worthy contender for Doom Metal Album of the Year in 2010 and still sounds very good and not at all cloying. Blizaro offers plenty of sinister atmosphere, spacey effects, nice gooey cheesy organ and analog synth tunes and very heavy sombre doom metal riffs that demonstrate Gallo’s loyalty to bands like Sabbath, Candlemass, Reverend Bizarre and Electric Wizard. The album artwork is very much in the same spirit as the album; it’s at once grotesque, creepy, hilarious and oozing with casein.

Contact: Razorback Recordings