Green Meteor
Consumed By A Dying Sun
(Argonauta)
Philadelphia stoner/space rock quartet Green Meteor has rocketed out from some dusky crypt with a full length, five-song debut, Consumed By A Dying Sun, a real good time record that should drag all the green huffing cave folk out of the smoky basement.
Full of rough instrumentation, savory feedback and blown out axe riffs, this is as cool a debut from an American metal band as I have heard so far this year. The album opens with a smattering of theme setting space sound effects, preparing the listener for blast off into “Acute Emerald Elevation” and search me for what that means. All I know is that the song has heart and energy to spare. It is a bong load of crushing guitar chords and blasting, out loose in the cosmos banshee vocals. The next track, “Sleepless Lunar Dawn” is, at nearly ten minutes, a real cruncher that would put the band on the head banger map. Green Meteor spins off into a noisy space on “In The Shadow Of Saturn” and they give their spin on traditional nasty thrash for the album’s title track closer. The band isn’t reaching for progressive qualities on Consumed, nor is this harrowing and bleak as contemporary black metal, but I don’t think they’re really looking to achieve those at all. Aside from a few gimmicks, the band is successful in sticking to the basics and that simplicity works like a tarnished little charm. Green Meteor shuffles around between a series of genres and tempos, keeps the energy going and at times can really groove up in a unique way. It’s not a danceable record, but if I imagine one of their blistering live sets, this isn’t the feet-in-concrete slow metal crowd before me.
Among my concerns with Consumed are the vocals. On a ragged metal record, crystal clear recordings and articulation are hardly the expectation, but these are too crude. They’re recorded sloppily and just thrown into the mix rather than layered in, and it’s a shame because from what I can hear in the delivery, they sound full of energy. Everything on Consumed points to high concept, but I don’t get that out of the material.
Vocals notwithstanding, there is an undeniably fun loving quality on Consumed that sets the record above it’s blown out, bleary eyed peers in the stoner metal world; just look at that colorful cover, the jaws of a wolf/sun open to consume a helio-gut full of dying planetary matter. This record is full of tracks that really remind you of an oft-forgotten quality: metal doesn’t have to be a down in the dumps, church burning gore fest. It can be fun as well.
