Lower Forty-Eight
Apertures
6.2
Synopsis:
A shimmering alt-rock meets Dillinger amalgamation that might not appeal to this site’s core target audience, but offers some enjoyably less extreme metal.
Review:
Occasionally, I do get sick of growling, screaming crumbling death and black metal and turn to bands like Tool, Clann Zu, soshuman, Lodown, Seemless and San Francisco’s Lower Forty-Eight for a slightly less harrowing metal listen.
With an indie rock backbone and a slight hardcore, emo gloss, Lower Forty-Eight, swagger and saunter through 10 tracks of artfully cool, coffee house, turtleneck and horn-rimmed glasses styled rock that your sociology professor from college would probably like. Not catchy enough for the mainstream, and littered with just enough caustic and angular bite to give it underground respect, but with enough quirky tempo changes and soaring melodies for college radio stations looking for the next cool band to name drop to replace Helmet. Vocalist Andy Lund has the typical alt rock whine and fuses a few hardcore screams here and there, and the riffs are hard to follow, streams of musical consciousness that both glisten and often rawk with new DEP like prose.
That all being said, I’m hardly going to revisit this record as much as sosohuman’s amazing Twenty Six, and try to jam tracks like the album's high point trio of “Afterlife”, the lumbering “Desperate Signs” and “Seventh Sight” and pretend I am as into them as backpack toting college students in a ‘cool’ 180 beer import bar in downtown San Francisco.
