Not to be confused with an alternative rock band from San Francisco, the Sex Type Thing in question hail from Saint Petersburg (much different), in Russia, and play a straightforward type of heavy/stoner rock that they adopted in 2007 after years of development, lineup and style changes. Their first album, Southern Dreams from Northern Reality, came out in 2009, and in March, they’ll follow it with Checked up by Time, snippets from which are available for listening on the Bandcamp player below.

I suppose one doesn’t name a band after a Stone Temple Pilots song and not have some measure of ’90s commercial rock influence, but for anyone who’d care to visit their MySpace to hear tracks off the first album, Sex Type Thing filter any grunge leanings through a riff-heavy approach that’s aiming for something different entirely. The vocals of Michael Chigidin come across a little too forward in the mix on the older material — “Long Way Home Blues” and “Freeway Ride,” for example — but judging by the snippets, that seems to have been at least somewhat taken care of on the new cuts. Hey, at least he can sing.

Straight-ahead European-style stoner rock is nothing new by this point, but Russia‘s burgeoning scene (bands like The Re-Stoned and The Grand Astoria) is only now starting to make itself known internationally, so it’s worth a look and listen to acts like Sex Type Thing to hear what kind of influences are at work. Or, if you’d rather just groove on it, that’s fine too.

Tags: Russia, Saint Petersburg, Sex Type Thing, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at 6:37 pm and is filed under On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.