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Rock fans of the millennial generation are a hard group to please, but in Energy, we find a group that can play to the extremes in this era’s unique taste for heavy grooves and throwback string play better than most. In their first album Rock Party, the indie veteran band makes a statement about the climate of their scene on the international level, and using their unique backgrounds as individual musicians, deliver a style of hard rock that stands as the literal antithesis of the jaded, neo-alternative dribble that has become so common in mainstream music today. Energy is not your average rock album, but then again, it comes fresh from the studio experiments of a band that is as far from average as you can get.
This album has one of the more fluid tracklists I’ve seen in a hard rock record lately, but it stops short of being an outright progressive offering. There is no storyline to the songs as we transition from the pop-metal shenanigans of “Fight for Your Freedom” and the title track, nor is there a lot of overzealous operatic moments in “You Are Too Good to Lose,” “Cry of a Child” or the bar brawling “Spitfire Glory Boy.” Instead, there are a lot of riffs that sort of bleed into each other and keep our heartrate on a steady incline; a set of beats that, in “This Part of Town is a No Go” for instance, echo in our brains for hours after the music stops; and paramount above all else, a consistent sense of danger no matter where we turn (see “And I’m Doing Alright” for the climax of this feeling).
All of that said, instrumental grandiosity is something that this band takes pretty seriously (at least in “We Dream the Dream,” “Spitfire Glory Boy,” and the album-opening “Rock Party”), but the lyrics that are sewn into these songs are rather cut and dry as well as free of the pretentious enigmas that tend to plague similarly stylized rock records. Energy knows how to be to the point in cornerstone tracks like “This Part of Town is a No Go,” and “You Are Too Good to Lose” without trimming the juicier bits of fat away from the instrumentation guiding their verses. It makes for an intoxicatingly surreal cocktail when it’s done right, and they do hit the mark 99 out of 100 times here.
You’d be hard-pressed to beat this rock n’ roll juggernaut this spring as far as debut albums go, and in the year since Energy was released worldwide, the band behind the magic has started to gain a lot of momentum that should yield us a sophomore effort soon. Hopefully, they will take this blueprint and grow from its most sterling points in their next recording session, but if they end up producing something that is essentially of the same breed as what they’ve given us in this first LP, I can honestly say that I’ll be satisfied just the same. Energy already knows who they are, and that’s the one thing that matters in this business more than almost anything else.
Jennifer Munoz
