Starship Monolith
Brand New EP

Remember the classic band Starship, whom evolved from the band Jefferson Starship? They have hitched a ride with the Discovery One towards Jupiter where they ends up meeting a black monolith with the 1x4x9 dimensions and according to Dr. David Bowen it can be full of Stars. After meeting the monolith the Starship band fuses with the monolith and left we have a black monolith playing the classical hits of Starship. That is one scenario for the name but somehow I doubt that it is the correct one as the Swedish Umeå based band does not really subscribe to the commercial type rock music that Starship stood for, and they do have Terrortory vocalist Johan Norström doing some aggressive death metal vocals on this album along with the other singer Christoffer Nilsson who just like Johan also is a guitarist of the band. They do have a cover that does not say very much of what is inside, more than it might be some explosive content so guessing from that would not really be wise.

There is apparently a long history to this band as recorded on the HAL 9000 computer, it tells of a seed of the band as far back as the late 90s but it was not until the return of Johan Norström to the band in the late 00s that the band recorded their debut album. Now they have a brand new EP out for us to take part of and cleverly enough it is named Brand New EP as well.

So what about this brand new EP? Well the band describes it as a mess musically and in a way they’d be right as it is a mishmash of influences that combines into a heavy rock’n’roll kind of music with a raw sense of aggression and a sense of extreme metal to it. Rock with a big sense of growly vocals which makes it a bit of a dark rock maybe. It is quite hard to describe the musical style really but something like what I said. The sound and production sounds rather good as well, it has six tracks and 22 minutes of music to offer.

The heavy rock with extreme metal vocals did not really go down too well with me to begin with, I was contemplating a rating of three from the early going through it but after time it has grown on me and now I have played it enough to really know it. The things that sounded a bit messy and incoherent to begin with starts to fall into place after a few listens and then it becomes a rather good album, it takes a little bit of effort to get there though (at least it did for me). So in the end we can say that the overall quality of this EP is fairly good.

Looking at the six songs on the EP I would say that the quality of them is fairly good overall, with the opening track as the best one. Even though I might not always agree with the vocal stylings of this band I have to admit that it works rather well for most parts of the album, so in the end I would have to approve this album for checking out if you like the genre. It maybe not be as brilliant as the HAL 9000 but I am sure it is a much more reliable companion in your vehicle.