Interview & Review: Slomosa, Tundra Rock
Posted in Bootleg Theater, Reviews on September 9th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Slomosa Interview with Benjamin Berdous, Sept. 5. 2024
[Click play above to stream an interview with Slomosa guitarist/vocalist Benjamin Berdous. The band’s first US tour starts this week with European touring thereafter. Dates are here.]
Bergen, Norway’s Slomosa were a lockdown-era salve when they released their self-titled debut (review here) in Aug. 2020, assembling together early singles “There is Nothing New Under the Sun” and “In My Mind’s Desert” as part of a barrage of catchy, memorable, mostly uptempo heavy rock tunes in a style that harkened back to not the beginnings of desert rock necessarily, but to a point at which is was codified and took on a life of its own as a genre. Tundra Rock, their nine-song/38-minute second album, arrives under different circumstances, though it too has shown inklings of its personality in advance singles “Rice,” “Cabin Fever” and “Battling Guns.”
But especially with the work the four-piece have put in touring over the last two-plus years, shifting quickly from upstarts to next-gen headliners in relatively short order thanks largely to the quality of their work and their onstage chemistry delivering it, Tundra Rock is inherently going to be less of a blindside for listeners. Slomosa, who have moved from Apollon Records to Stickman (Elder, King Buffalo, Iron Jinn) for Europe and signed to MNRK Heavy (High on Fire, Somnuri, Crowbar, etc.) for the US, are a big deal, and a band on whom numerous hopes have been pinned, fairly or not, for carrying a heavy rock torch in the years to come. Tundra Rock is anticipated. A moment to be answered.
There is very little one might ask a desert-style heavy rock record to do in 2024 that Tundra Rock doesn’t deliver with aplomb, character and purpose. The band’s lineup would seem to have solidified, with guitarist/vocalist Benjamin Berdous emerging as a frontman presence alongside bassist Marie Moe — who backs Berdous to make the chorus of “Cabin Fever” a highlight before taking the lead spot for the start of “Red Thundra” at the end of side A — lead guitarist Tor Erik Bye and drummer Jard Hole. The latter makes his first studio appearance here and proves malleable to the driving finish of “Cabin Fever” no less than the weighted crashes of album-intro “Afghansk Rev,” bringing a makes-its-own-groove ideology so that even the taps of the snare drum early in “Battling Guns” become a hook, reminiscent of gunfire as they may or may not intentionally be.
As with the self-titled, Tundra Rock is very much about its individual songs. “Rice” and “Cabin Fever” roll out after “Afghansk Rev” with vitality and tonal depth, and “Battling Guns” picks up from side B’s short piano intro “Good Mourning” to move fluidly into the album’s second half. The singles are well composed and all the more a welcome to the album for the contingent of Slomosa‘s fanbase — because, yes, there is one — who’ve heard them before, but whether one arrives to the record with prior familiarity with (some of) the material or not, part of the point is in engaging the audience. Slomosa are not fostering happenstance hooks, and neither is it coincidental how “Battling Guns” moves into “Monomann,” “MJ” and “Dune”; the band pushing deeper until the mellow-heavy, vocals-follow-the-riff conclusion of “Dune,” which feels monolithic in its fuzz but actually never stops moving, dancing throughout its deceptively tight five-minute course.
As a follow-up to a successful debut, Tundra Rock shows growth in craft and the band’s approach generally, whether it’s the smooth groove-riding of “Rice” or the dug-in riff-twists of “Monomann,” which is organic to the point of sounding like it came together in about 10 minutes at a rehearsal one night, adding to the personality and charm of the record in intangible ways. Moe‘s delivery of the initial verse in “Red Thundra” happens during a quiet intro that reminds vividly of the jammier side of the still-missed Sungrazer, and even though Berdous comes back as the song sweeps into its full volume, it’s a standout moment that one hopes will be a point of development in the future as the interplay of voices makes Slomosa‘s overarching dynamic that much richer. The second half of the album, which has less advantage as regards featuring singles — one out of four songs (plus an intro), as opposed to side A, for which two of the three non-intro tracks were streamed ahead of the release — offers subtle diversity without veering from what works.
“Monomann” is the shortest song at 3:50 and is a swinging riff to follow as it linear-builds across its succession of verses, and “MJ” rolls out with kick-drum emphasis behind its chug and a vocal from Berdous that reminds just how keyed in on the 1998 self-titled Queens of the Stone Age the band are in terms of influence, but is modern and full in its sound, memorable for its repetitions around the lyric “I know how it goes,” delivered with some measure of resignation for the story being told. The room-mic outset of “Dune” feels very QOTSA-era as well, but here too Slomosa find ways to make it their own, moving with the guitar through shifts in volume and strum as the riff-chant takes on more fervency. At 5:27, the closer is the longest cut on Tundra Rock, but by two seconds over “Rice” back at (or at least near) the outset. Even in those final moments, Slomosa are more about setting up crowd participation at shows than indulging some grandiose spaceout. They are focused, sharp and professional, as they have been all along.
Tundra Rock is quick in affirming the songwriting and appeal of Slomosa‘s debut, and they come across like there’s yet potential to be realized in their sound. Between the interplay of Berdous and Moe on vocals and the self-awareness that underscores their material, a nascent sense of poppish quirk and a generally organic progression in the two-thus-far LPS, there still seems to be room to grow. But they know where they’re coming from, are clearly writing songs to be played live, whether that’s “Rice,” “Cabin Fever” and “Battling Guns” or “Red Thundra,” “MJ” and “Dune,” and are distinguished by the level at which they do so. I don’t know whether ‘tundra rock’ will take on a life of its own in the spirit of desert rock before it, but if this album is to be the shape of such a thing and a point of influence for other acts to follow in turn, one could very easily do a hell of a lot worse. Either way, it is one of 2024’s strongest declarations in heavy rock, and whatever hype it has, it earns.
