Allah Las – Worship The Sun

Rating:

I say this with little to no sarcasm—there hasn’t been an influx of retro American rock these days—I mean there’s a plethora of garage and surf rock, but not much of what helped inspire this genre. So when it comes to bands like Allah Las, I’m a little soft, but granted, there’s something infectious about their sound, as if it’s a straight blast from the past; akin to that perfect vintage collectable you find tucked away in some mom and pop store. Though old fashioned in style, Worship The Sun has just enough jangle to keep up with today’s genres.

“De Vida Voz” begins as a subtle and soft introduction to the album, with plenty of gang vocals and jingle-jangle to float anyone’s boat, though the very opening part allude to a deeper, rockier side to the band and album that will be revealed later. The whole number sounds like a glazed over desert rock tune—the guitars play off each other in a campy mix, while the gang vocals blend together with the guitars in a nasal ethereal kind of vibe. It’s the perfect kind of song that you want as its still somehow stiflingly hot in the last (who am I kidding, this is Texas) September slump of the summer.

There are quite a few tracks to listen to on this album, so if you aren’t careful, you just might miss some of the good ones. In the third position, “Artifact” is a hauntingly western rock song, which creeps along for longer than most of the tracks here, and oddly enough it has the kind of build that most of the other songs don’t lead up to. You get Miles Michaud on lead vocals through a thick glaze of reverb and fuzz, while the music forms a kind of storytelling mode. Though it comes across as a story in the instrumentation, Michaud’s vocals have a different idea and you can hear the build within it as he circles round for the last time, singing, “it goes on and on and on…” You get the feeling like this song, or style of song, though done well by the group, has been around for a while.

While the overall style on Worship The Sun is really worth your time, the album feels a bit like it could have used some revision. There isn’t a track that’s bad per-se, but a little more precision in the tracks selected, or variation, would have given this record the appeal it lacks when you reach its end and the tracks have all blurred together in one American rock haze.