If I’m a sucker for anything in this universe, it’s Swedish stoner rock. There’s plenty of great bands out there from the rest of the world, but for my money, the Swedes do it with a love and respect for the genre that — as a nation — no one else can match. You’re be hard pressed these days to even find a band in the US to admit they even play stoner rock, let alone actually do it.

As such, Stockholm‘s Death Rattle Six, who’ve just self-released their second album in two years (fourth overall) in the form of Death Rattle Six, are definitely on my radar. I haven’t heard the complete album, but the old-school four-piece (vocals, guitar, bass, drums) have posted four of the tracks on their MySpace page for checking out, and I’ve been gladly rocking out to the early Dozerisms of “Rover” and the Truckfighters-style fuzz of “Down the Hole.” Death Rattle Six claim an Alice in Chains influence, and I can hear it in the way singer Greg layers his voice on “The Beast Within,” but it’s not the rampant bottom of the mouth “Hey whoa yea-yuh” that’s infected so much of American commercial hard rock in the last two decades. More like a less laid back Asteroid.

If any of these words — Dozer, Truckfighters, Asteroid — are ringing a bell with you, you’d do well to look up “Torn Inside,” which makes use of a similar nighttime desertry. Death Rattle Six are, at least on these four tracks, playing desert rock exclusively, but if their genre sticktoitiveness is admirable, all the more so is the fact that the basic instrumental tracks for the Death Rattle Six album were done completely live. As in the most successful cases where that’s so, these songs have an urgency to them which simply can’t be faked.

They have links (again, on their MySpace) where you can buy Death Rattle Six on CDBaby or iTunes, but they also appear to be giving it away via internationally famed torrent site The Pirate Bay. Of course, The Obelisk urges you to support quality independent talent however you can. For me, that means keeping Death Rattle Six on the radar and looking forward to hearing the rest of the album.

Tags: Death Rattle Six, Stockholm, Sweden, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 11:04 am and is filed under On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.