Zed, Volume: The Other Kind
Posted in Reviews on August 23rd, 2019 by JJ Koczan
Zed‘s vision of rock and roll is not polite. It is not about accommodation. It’s the kind of rock and roll that drinks both your beer and its own, is loud, goes late, and damns tomorrow because it had already damned today first. It’s the kind of rock and roll that might put a large black rooster on its album cover and let the dick joke make itself. It is, as they might put it on their latest offering, “The Other Kind.” Volume is the fourth full-length from the San Jose, California, four-piece, and sees their edge undiminished in their decade-plus tenure. As their alliance with Ripple Music enters its third release, with the label having stood behind 2016’s Trouble in Eden (review here) and a reissue earlier this year of 2013’s Desperation Blues (discussed here), it results in a collection running 10 tracks and 48 minutes of aggressively executed straightforward heavy rock with a broad foundation in punk, metal and classic rock; the amalgam well familiar to those who’ve followed Zed over their years.
In that regard, what ultimately distinguishes Volume is the clarity with which it is delivered. The band’s lineup — guitarist/vocalist Peter Sattari, bassist Mark Aceves, guitarist Greg Lopez and drummer Sean Boyles — has never sounded so firm in their purpose, and while their songwriting acumen has always been central to their style, the material here feels tighter and even more purposeful than that of Trouble in Eden, and the energy in the band’s performance has never been so effectively captured. Credit at least in part for that needs to go to engineer Tim Narducci (also of The Watchers), with whom the band worked on part of the recording last time around as well as on Desperation Blues — their 2010 debut, The Invitation, was self-recorded — and who obviously gets what they’re going for. It’s right there in the name of the album: Volume. Zed are not trying to convey some grand concept in their sound unless that grand concept might be the largesse of their sound itself, and thus Volume becomes its own celebration of that intangible thing that rock and roll has celebrated since its first hijacked blues riff — a vitality that simply can’t be heard at anything less than a shout.
Broken neatly in half with a longer cut closing each side, Volume might also be stating itself as a recommendation to the audience, though I’m not certain that with Zed that really needs to be stated at this point. How else would one take on tracks like “The Other Kind,” “The End” or the shreddy side B highlight “The Great Destroyer” but as loud as possible? The choruses of the slowed-down “Wings of the Angel,” the side B leadoff “Chingus” (video posted here), and “Hollow Men,” on which Boyles seems to give his cymbals an extra-cruel beating, are certainly standouts, and even as “Wings of the Angel” or “Poison Tree” pull back on pace as compared to the thrust of “The Other Kind” or “The Great Destroyer,” there’s no letup in terms of efficiency in their craft.
“Poison Tree” is perhaps the catchiest of the bunch, which is no easy feat considering its surroundings, and as Zed expand the palette with some B3 on the penultimate “Time and Space” courtesy of Brad Barth, their central mission of song-driven, riff-led heavy remains steady through the extra flourish en route to the closer “The Troubadour,” which is the longest inclusion on Volume at 6:31 and finds the band taking more chances in terms of melody, layering vocals for a chorus effect to go with Sattari in a fashion that is every bit worthy of finishing out the record even though it runs counter to the harder-edged approach heard earlier. Airy leads and a legitimately soaring chorus add atmosphere to the finale that one wouldn’t necessarily guess Zed would be interested in harnessing, but is only more welcome for that. Even “The Mountain,” from Trouble in Eden, which tapped into some similar ideas in the guitar, didn’t dare go so far as the vocals, and a greater focus on melody only suits the song itself, which, given how much of Zed‘s approach — again — is about the songs, makes Volume stronger on the whole.
Signal of a new direction for Zed? Probably not, and I say that not because I think Zed are creatively stagnant — far from it, given the efforts they take to refine their songwriting here, though they might bristle at calling anything they do “refined” — but because they don’t sound like a band who are interested in fixing what clearly isn’t broken in their sound. “The End” has a less throaty vocal in its initial verse as well, and it may be that their dynamic is expanding, but if it’s going to happen, Zed seem to be conscious enough to let it happen in an unforced way. Because while their overall affect is loud, clear and full, both recorded and on stage, they don’t do anything that feels unnatural in either side. They’re not going to seek out vintage equipment to record on or spend tens of thousands of dollars on this or that mixing board, and they’re not going to find some overly slick digital cut and paste method for putting riffs together.
They’re a songwriting and performance band, and that’s what you get on Volume. You get songwriting, you get performance. Sure, they’ve grown in the three years since Trouble in Eden — though they’re not so mature as to, say, not make a dick joke on their album cover — but the core of Zed remains unchanged, and it seems more likely than not that that’s how it will be for the duration. Zed were not inexperienced in bands when they formed, and as a group who knew what they wanted going in, they’ve been walking their path steadily ever since. What’s truly impressive about that is not just that they’ve brought this mission to bear in the memorable tracks of Volume, but that there’s that accompanying performance aspect. In payoffs for “Wings of an Angel,” or “Chingus” or “The Great Destroyer” — take your pick, really — they harness not just a live energy, but the energy of a band confident in the righteousness of their voluminous cause. And so they are.
