Gods And Queens
Self Titled
2.1
Gods and Queens’ MySpace page lists the band’s style as “Dutch pop/Chinese traditional/Hawaiian,” this is apparently the band's idea of a joke, as their sound clearly does not fall into any of those categories. Guess what other category their sound doesn’t fall into: Metal. I think this album was put into the wrong box and mailed to the Metal Review fortress by mistake. In my estimation this whiny, droning record falls into the indie rock category, or maybe it is post-rock, or whatever it is you call rock music that goes out of its way to not rock. Why, you wonder, am I bothering to review this? I was sick of looking at it, and I thought that if I got this album out of the review queue, a respectable metal album might take its place (although another shitty metalcore record is more likely).
It seems I may not be the only one feeling apathetic towards Gods and Queens, as the band apparently did not give enough of a shit about their own music to give it songs titles. That’s fine though, because they all sound the same to me anyway. The only thing that really differentiates the tracks from one another is that some times the singer sounds pissed off and other times he just sounds like a shitty singer. Fortunately, the vocals are fairly low in the mix. The accompanying music consists primarily of atonal, semi-distorted chords jangling over an oddly timed groove, repeated ad nauseum. In the band's favor, they have the courtesy to keep things brief. The album has only seven tracks, most clocking in at under three minutes, the glaring exception being the closing track, a tiresome instrumental which hangs around for a very long nine minutes and forty seconds.
I am sure that somewhere on this big beautiful rock we call home there are people who enjoy this type of music, and probably somewhere in the boundless expanse of cyberspace there is a review site that caters to this type of music and a reviewer there who will expound upon the nuances and creativity of Gods and Queens' self-titled (or is it untitled?) debut, but not here. This is not Metal. This is not good. Do not buy it.
