HOWLING GIANT
HOWLING GIANT “Glass Future”
By Dr. Abner Mality
After hours of slaughter and bloodletting, it’s kind of nice to unwind with something that’s maybe not out to incinerate your eardrums. HOWLING GIANT from Nashville, TN is a good reprieve from total mayhem while still retaining a heavy edge. You can slip “Glass Future” on and float away on jams of ethereal groove.
I would describe these guys as a mash-up of stoner rock, psychedelic prog metal and even good ol’ southern rock. There’s some resemblance to bands like BARONESS and MASTODON, but also traces of 70’s URIAH HEEP and WISHBONE ASH and poppy multi-tracked vocals that almost resemble bubblegum pop at times. OK, by now you know you’re not gonna get blast beats and gravity bombs from HOWLING GIANT, but what you will get is laidback hard rock that’s easy to chill out to.
There’s a cool kind of haziness to songs like “Siren Song”, “Sunken City” and the title track that loosens you up and relieves tension. Hammond organ mixes with twisty stoner riffs and those three-layered bubblegum vocals. Some cuts like the excellent “First Blood of Melchior” and “Aluminum Crown” have some crunch and aggression to them, but others like “Tempest and the Liar’s Gateway” and the dreamy “There’s Time Now” are just bluesy, laidback cuts. This is not an album for non-stop headbanging, but maybe it is one if you want to recover from a bout of such activity. “Glass Future” won’t change your life, but who says it has to?