From the moment their self-titled release arrived on Bandcamp in 2022, Polish doom/stoner/space rock band Volt Ritual proved to be an act headed for greatness. Whether channelling Black Sabbath on that debut, or putting elements of Hawkwind and Neu! through a much heavier filter on their ‘Return To Jupiter’ follow up, the musicians never sounded anything less than a hundred percent committed to delivering the riffs.
Category Archives: Album & EP Reviews
THE DANIEL JAMES GANG – Darkness Over This Town EP
On one of his social media channels, near the beginning of 2025, musician Daniel James mused how he was always busy. So busy, in fact, that he barely had time to sleep. At that time, he was a member of at least four bands – including Indonesian Junk (who’d just embarked on a hiatus) and reformed punkers Chinese Telephones.
NEGATIVE THIRTEEN – Recover What You Can
On their full length release ‘Mourning Asteri’ from 2022, Negative Thirteen tapped into a brilliantly heavy sound. The bulk of the material fused classic doom metal riffs with a sludgy aesthetic which resulted in a well orchestrated, uncompromising record. Unlike some doom-sludge acts, though, the album flaunted a brilliant production job which placed as much interest on the bass as the sledgehammer guitar parts. It could be argued that the material often valued massive riffs over any kind of immediacy, but there was no doubt that this band meant business.
Their 2025 follow up, ‘Recover What You Can’ is often just as heavy, but with a couple of tracks favouring an epic length allowing the doomy band more room for manouevre, it sometimes feels as if Negative Thirteen haven’t so much “branched out”, but descended even more deeply into their own world of sludge derived sounds.
THE JOHN SALLY RIDE – Melomaniacs
Throughout their fifth album, power pop band The John Sally Ride explore various different topics that’ll be familiar to the obsessive music fan. You’ll find songs here that recall a big “leap forward” in terms of available formats (‘The First Time On CD’), tread the fine line between apprehension and excitement when a much-loved band returns after time in the wilderness (‘Their New Album’), and celebrate the importance of lyric sheets in a pre-internet age.
RISE OF THE WOOD – Sleep EP
Rise of The Wood’s debut album – 2017’s ‘First Seed’ – shared some impressively fuzzy sounding riffs, capturing an overall sound that mixed stoner rock with a few good old rock ‘n’ roll thrills, but despite a huge amount of chutzpah, never really felt like essential listening. It was a record with some great ingredients and a great energy, but compared to similar fare from other bands, it lacked a little something in the songwriting department, and was sometimes blighted by a shouty vocal that didn’t always suit the music in hand. Taken on its own merits, though, it wasn’t without charm: ‘Hyperspeed’ played like a superb tribute to peak Corrosion of Conformity; ‘Faded Horizon’ captured the darkness of Alice In Chains tunes like ‘Nutshell’ very well, and ‘Hell Yeah’ fused stoner metal elements with a groove laden approach that showed how easily the band could handle a great riff. It was a flawed record, yes, but not without entertainment value.