Denizen
Whispering Wild Stories
Self-released

Whispering Wild Stories is the third album from French noisemakers Denizen, who thrive on a rare mix of cowboy freedom and back alley boorishness, meaning they roll out endless amounts of dusty and rowdy stoner riffs but shove ‘em in your face with some hardcore attitude instead of letting you bake in ‘em. While Whispering Wild Stories doesn’t quite contain the brilliant animosity of Cursed, the toothless tomfoolery of Maylene, or the Norwegian death roll of Kvelertak, Denizen are able to harnesses the same kind of bloody-lipped urgency of each of ‘em in some way and throw their own wine-drunk, hot rod funk into it as well. Despite the fact this album is self-released, they still managed to snag Nick Zampiello again to master it at New Alliance East in the good ol’ U.S. of A., which no doubt helped shape its eight-song landscape into the motor-driven sewer-fucker it is. Add some sweet cover art by J. Issac and a cover of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” and you’ve got an album that’s truly très bien!

Listen to “Casino Royale” from Whispering Wild Stories!

Souvenir’s Young America
The Name of the Snake
Init Records

Souvenir’s Young America hollow out a small part of your mind in order to separate themselves from the dense din of all the instrumental post-rock and experimental metal out there, and in that crater they lay something so remarkably vast, so terribly scary, that a mere whisper of its presence alerts you to your certain doom. Not that the Virginia band’s latest album, The Name of the Snake, is abundantly evil, it’s just that it exudes a numbing solitude that borders on hallucination desolation. The four songs laid down here (you get three bonus tracks from their September Songs EP as well if you happen to have the CD) moan like a five-hundred-year-old desert wind, beat on the old, dry, cracked earth like a chain-gang of ghosts, and lead you on a callous, lonely walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The star of this album, however, is the harp. The heavy momentum on “Water (Forgetting the Past),” “Vanishing (Remaining),” and “Amnesia (A Victor’s History)” isn’t disrupted by the haunting harmonica that calls you home with a totem’s tongue; instead they work together in some kind of brazen, taunting harmony. The backwoods brass and cowboy harmonica of “Dust (Erasing the Future),” the album’s commandeering ballad, is for outlaws only, and captures the spirit of wide open, starry nights and circling, hungry vultures. Again, the dichotomy of hope and desperation abounds. You don’t get the same old epic, aural sound scape with SYA that you do with other bands of their ilk. What you get instead is the distinct, suffocating, and palpable feeling that the end is near. Deep, awesome stuff.

Listen to “Vanishing (Remaining)” from The Name of the Snake!

Night Horse
Perdition Hymns
Tee Pee

Even though they hail from the City of Angels, Night Horse carry themselves with that Americana swagger befitting East Coast brawlers, chucking big, dopey, boogie-fried riffs at you like ham-sized fists that leave deep, lasting bruises. Picking up where their 2008 debut, The Dark Won’t Hide You, left off, Perdition Hymns lays the Southern stoner rock on nice n’ thick, incorporating plenty of organ, slide, and 70s-infused boxcar blues to send you on a weed-eating nostalgia trip to Altamont and back. Sure, it’s got all the dusty charm of Skynyrd or the Allmans, and sounds like a nasty mix of Cracktorch and the ‘Crowes, but ultimately (and maybe it’s because of the way singer Sam James Velde howls at the blood red moon) the songs on Perdition Hymns come off as bastard inventions from an alternate universe where Danzig grows up a wayward cowboy and not Lucifer’s brawny spawn.

Listen to “Shake Your Blues” from Perdition Hymns!