Let’s face it, I’m a sucker for Swedish heaviness. When the dudes of post-sludge outfit Signo Rojo reached out with their sonically crushing demo material (streaming on their MySpace), I was bound to pay attention. The band, which formed in 2009 in Blekinge and is a double-guitar four-piece with bassist Jonas Nilsson — not to be confused with Johannes Nilsson of countrymen fuzz-rockers Asteroid — handling vocals, specialize in a kind of angular ambience. “Lashing the Hellespont,” for example, owes its central riff to Remission-era Mastodon, but “These Machines Used to Kill” takes an early/mid-period Neurosis approach, especially in Nilsson‘s vocal cadence, updating the sound without falling prey to the Isis-isms that have all but flattened post-metal creatively in the last couple years.

Their longer songs, the seven-minute “The Calling” and 8:43 “The Apotheosis,” tend to meander and lose a sense of themselves structurally, but at least in the case of the latter, Signo Rojo rein their wanderings back in for a genuine payoff. Cuts like the shorter “Dying Sun” and ultra-sludgy “The Beast Beneath” are tighter in terms of arrangement, though Nilsson‘s vocals are high in the mix, rising above his own bass, the guitars of Hampus Henningsson and Elias Mellberg and Pontus Svensson‘s drums in a standout kind of way. Nilsson is a more than capable growler, but for what Signo Rojo are playing, it should really be the guitars in the lead to play up the atmospherics. That’s why we have demos.

There are plenty of heads out there — I count myself among them — tired of the post-metal wave, but Signo Rojo‘s more varied crunch is still worth the negligible time it takes to listen (be it on MySpace, Facebook or ReverbNation), and to that end, here’s their video for the song “The Calling”:

Tags: Blekinge, Signo Rojo, Sweden, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 2:59 pm and is filed under On the Radar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.