Lovingly pinched from The Obelisk: It was kind of a surprise when Small Stone signed West Chester, Pennsylvania, riff mongers Backwoods Payback. Not that the band is undeserving. In the live arena, they stand up to anyone you want to put them against (including, regularly, formidable labelmates Lo-Pan), but their recorded output struck me as rawer than most of what the Detroit label gets behind these days, grittier and with more dirt under its fingernails. Listening to the finished product of Backwoods Payback’s Small Stone debut full-length, Momantha, it’s easy to see that same roughness was the appeal all along.
The four-piece have a sound that’s familiar enough to stoner rockers, but not based solely on fuzz-drenched guitar or Kyuss-style desert speeding. There’s something staid about Momantha; it’s like sludge if sludge went to therapy and started the long process of making peace with itself.
There are probably a host of bands one could cite as influences or from whom elements are taken and made part of Backwoods Payback’s style, but the resulting brew is much harder to pin down. Captured at Small Stone’s go-to studio – Mad Oak in Allston, Massachusetts – by the label’s go-to engineer – Mr. Benny Grotto – the live edge that made the prior Use Magic to Kill Death EP and self-titled long-player sound so exciting is all the more vivid.
Potentially named after a hockey player (that being Moe Mantha, who did time playing for Pennsylvania teams in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Hershey), Backwoods Payback’s latest balances catchy songs with a driving edge. Momantha takes some time to settle in, but after a few listens, proves indispensable.
Opener ‘You Know How This Works’ proves aptly-named, with wavy guitars from Mike Cummings and Rylan Caspar backed by the hard-hit tom work of Steve Curtiss. Soon enough, bassist Jessica Baker also follows the bouncing riff and the album essentially gets its intro the same way the song does. Cummings, as the vocalist, has an approach that has almost no choice but to go all-out as often as humanly possible. It’s melodic, clean for most of the record (the screams on the later ‘Timegrinder’ being an exception), and carries an undercurrent of drunkard’s woes that adds a bluesy feel to the rhythmic delivery of the lyrics.
Continue reading: The Obelisk » Blog Archive » Backwoods Payback, Momantha: Time to Grind.
Tags: Album of the day, Backwoods Payback, JJ Koczan, Momantha, sludge, small stone records, The Obelisk
This entry was posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2011 at 1:57 pm and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Backwoods Payback should totally play at Roadburn. They would melt faces (in a good way).