Assessing the success of a record with one transcendent song amidst a bunch of OK material can be tough. I’ll call it the King Goat Conundrum. Long time readers of our blog will remember the tongue bath the English doom band received for their debut record by our Angry Overlord back in 2016. My own experience of the record was more mixed. altogether, it was solid enough traditional doom, but the title track “Conduit” was and remains absolutely jaw-dropping. My experience of the album as a whole is like sitting in a room with glitchy fluorescent lighting that’s dim and flickering for every song until suddenly snapping fully on bright and clear and damn near blinding for the duration of “Conduit” before beginning to flicker again. The other songs aren’t bad, but held up to that highlight, they’re almost clumsy by comparison. Even now I can’t tell if I hold Conduit in higher regard than I should because of that one song or if I’m too hard on it because the other songs don’t match up. Spokane, Washington’s Kadabra present me with a similar conundrum on their sophomore album Umbra.
Kadabra play a fairly stock standard fuzzed out stoner/psych rock heavily reliant on the 70s for aesthetic direction as well as contemporary revivalists like The Black Angels. Umbra has a bit more terrestrial than cosmic approach, with only a few distorted warping or echo effects, however Kadabra do use electric organ and layered vocals over their earthy guitar grooves. Carcharodon noted in his review of their debut that Garrett Zanol’s almost androgynous vocals help these Washingtonians stand out a bit from the crowd, and I’d have to agree. Also noticeable in the milieu is Chase Howard’s high-energy drum performance, especially when he’s allowed to cut loose as he does on “The Devil.” Production-wise, there’s a round bounce to the drums that pops rather than booms, lending Umbra another sonic wrinkle to set it slightly apart.
Excluding transcendent song “The Serpent” and “The Serpent II,” an acoustic reprise closing out the record, Umbra is a mixed experience. Songs like “High Priestess” and “Mountain Tamer” tend to wear out their welcome as the relatively sharp verse/chorus structures give way to bouncy jam sessions. There’s an upbeat peppiness to Kadabra’s riff sequences that runs against my personal preference for the style, but I can’t say they don’t play them well. “Midnight Hour” is a better written song than most of what bubbles up out of the corduroy clad occult crowd, and it makes a nice set up for the record’s lynchpin. That said, the song’s first three minutes are a touch too happy hippie for me. “Battle of Avalon” does a much better job stitching together serious-minded grooves that drive rather than strut or bounce, resulting in a seven and a half minute song that feels half that length. On another record, it might be the highlight. But it doesn’t approach “The Serpent.”
There are parts of songs, well placed crescendoes or especially affecting grooves, that one can usually point to and say “this is my favorite part of the song.” Kadabra take that part and stretch it out over five minutes and forty seven seconds. The moment “Midnight Hour” ends and the simultaneous electric organ/guitar/drum strike launches “The Serpent,” the mood of the record shifts and it becomes clear the band is operating on another level. It’s an effortless jam built on a timeless riff and a wide open emotional throttle, and it leaves me with the problem I outlined above. Do I think less of the other material because the band has a song like this in them, or does “The Serpent” help me appreciate and warm up to the other material? After several listens to Umbra, it’s a bit of both. The other material, “Midnight Hour” and “Battle of Avalon” especially, is decent stuff. But remove “The Serpent,” and the album as a whole suffers.
Die hard fans of fuzzed out stoner/psych will no doubt find Umbra more enjoyable taken as a whole. If you just can’t get enough riffy 70s occult rock, you could do a lot worse than what Kadabra has to offer. For those of you who either dabble in the style or maybe grow tired of such well-trod sonic territory, wondering if it can ever sound fresh again, you don’t have to listen to this whole record. Just five minutes and forty seven seconds of it.
Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps kbps mp3
Label: Heavy Psych Sounds
Website: kadabraband.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: October 6th, 2023
