£8.99 for a shiny coaster!! (Shadows On The Sun - Zen Guerilla)

Member Name: Kepler

Product:	Shadows On The Sun - Zen Guerilla
Date:	27/11/07 (71 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A handful of decent rock tracks

Disadvantages: Too many contrasting styles. The album doesn't work as a whole

Shadows on the Sun is the fourth full length release from the American quartet Zen Guerrilla. In the twenty years or so that they have been knocking around the blues/rock scene they have never really managed to break the surface. They remain submerged within a pool of similar artists, all of whom are struggling to get themselves noticed or produce something that could be considered a break from the norm. Blending influences from genres as far ranging as garage rock and gospel, the music of Zen Guerrilla does its utmost to avoid being pigeon holed.

With 13 tracks (plus a bonus live track) and a forty two minute running time the album is pretty standard fare and Zen Guerrilla rarely stray from the 3-4 minute 'pop song' template. In some ways this is a blessing as the songs are short and punchy affairs, there one minute, gone the next. Opening track 'Barbed Wire' is testament to this with its catchy central guitar riff that seems to hold the song together and is used as an anchor for the other instruments. The vocals are also pretty tidy and really seem in keeping with the style of the song with Marcus' bluesy howlings playing themselves off nicely against the dark, brooding guitars. From this moment on however, the album descends into farce and over the next few tracks it is almost entirely destroyed by its own awfully clichéd blues. 'Smoke Rings' is a dour and sombre affair, a standard blues track that has been done so many times before and done with so much more style than here. The vocals are terrible and have clearly been digitally altered to give them an over the top almost sickly, bluesy feel. It made me wonder whether the producer Jack Endino had lost the knob to his reverb dial and as a consequence the whole album was unavoidably drenched in the stuff.

This was one of the great disappointments with this album for me, as Jack Endino has worked with so many great artists including Nirvana, Mud Honey and Bruce Dickinson. With these artists he managed to bring out their best qualities and produced records loved by so many people. With Zen Guerrilla it seems he has managed to highlight everything that is bad about them and then amplified it by a factor of ten. Some people may point out that Zen Guerrilla aren't exactly Nirvana but I have heard Zen Guerrilla sound so much better than this.

As the album progresses we only travel further down the clichéd blues road and the vocals become even more ridiculous, with the inclusion of gospel style wailing, which is completely at odds with the music surrounding it. Then, just when you think things couldn't get any worse the opening bars of 'Evening Sun' hit your tormented ears and the evil, dulcet tones of a mid-tempo, country rock song pollutes the surrounding air. Pair this with a pointless two minute instrumental track and various other sub standard blues style offerings and what you have is not only a poor album but a poor collection of songs. At this point the album has ceased to exist as an entire entity and what we have is a loose collection of songs that unwittingly inhabit the same album.

In amongst the maelstrom however, there are some really good garage rock/blues tracks. 'Inferno', an angry and pulsating song blasts with an intensity that would have been welcomed across the entire album and Marcus' vocals seem to have a more natural feel on this track. In the middle of the album, slap bang in the centre of the craziness we have 'Dirty Mile', which as its title suggests is an earthy, grubby rock song. Fast, distorted guitars are the order of the day and the vocals are suitably raspy. These songs see Zen Guerrilla at their best and serve to highlight the sort of record that they could make if they just forgot the fake blues and country styling and stuck to what they are so clearly good at - short, catchy rock songs.

In many ways the far ranging genres employed by Zen Guerrilla play a pivotal role in the ultimate downfall of this album, one minute the album is a rock record, the next a blues record and then a country rock record. The result is a disturbing, stuttering album that fails to meld together as a whole. Taken as individuals, apart from the other songs, tracks like 'Barbed Wire' and 'Inferno' stand out as really catchy, infectious sort of songs. However, when you intersperse these songs with so many uncomplimentary styles the influence of the good songs starts to diminish and you only start to remember the bad tracks. For me this album marks a significant low point in the career of Zen Guerrilla and it will now be a difficult task to convince me to buy another one of their records, without a shadow of a doubt this is one to avoid - like the plague. On the plus side though, I had a nice shiny coaster to place my coffee on whilst writing this review - not bad for £8.99.

Summary: Avoid like the plague