…And Weird Tales don’t really thread it, I’m afraid. It’s not for want of trying, and there are some great moments, but the recipe is just… odd. To get a sense of what’s going on here, we need to unpack what Weird Tales and SC,SC are about. The band plays psychedelic doom with a strong emphasis on fuzzy riffs, deep bass, and clean vocals. This is classic Kyuss worship but with the hazy, drug-addled edge of early Sabbath. So far, so good. The problem is that only one of these elements works, and only intermittently at that. And when combined with the aforementioned weird tone (humorous? Serious?), and odd song names (“Dead People’s Shit,” “Krokodil Blues”), it ends up all becoming a bit bewildering.
The main issue with SC,SC is that the dense grooves and riffs are often great, but they’re diluted by too much repetition and meandering psychedelia. Frequently, songs will generate serious momentum with purposeful guitar work and melodies, only to be completely derailed by minutes of repetition, before descending into instrumental noodliness. “Undertaker,” for example, begins fantastically: a dense and catchy riff combines with purposeful drumming to set the scene. But that riff is bludgeoned into oblivion by the halfway point when we switch to a slower, honey-dense section which mires the song down, and from which it is never able to extricate itself. This pattern is repeated all the way to worst offender, the closer, “Acid Lobotomy,” which ends up lazily cannibalizing its own melody repeatedly during its bloated 9:35 run time.
The other problem is lead guitarist and frontman Dima’s vocals. He opts for the clean approach, which suits the music, and when he stays in the lower ranges, with quieter passages behind him, he’s fine. But the minute things get rowdy, or he needs to go higher, the music swallows his voice up or he goes flat. Wincingly flat. Worryingly, the best bits of SC,SC are the instrumental passages, or the sections where he can stay low and in register. Individual performances disappearing into a soupy quagmire results in an album that feels substantially longer than its 40-minute run-time.
SC,SC is a frustrating experience because there are glimmers of good ideas here (such as a more serious approach to the fuzzy stoner genre; really crunchy riffs; social commentary beyond just being stoned), but they’re lost in the swamp of repetition, questionable psychedelic choices and a weak vocal performance. Weird Tales have the potential for something more, but they’ll need to sharpen up considerably if they want to stand out. If they don’t, they will continue to fall into the AMG “stoner doom” trap.
Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Interstellar Smoke Records
Websites: weird.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/weirdtalesband
Releases Worldwide: September 1st, 2023
