Grass
Fresh Grass

I wonder why a band would call itself Grass, isn’t that a bit of a handicap considering what a search for grass on the web will turn up. Perhaps social media crap makes it more easy to be noticed but I would still select a more unique name and I would have a real website. But that is perhaps just me, who often spends hours trying to find information for the reviews when the bands and labels don’t care to have any anywhere. But it isn’t the name, or the title that happens to be Fresh Grass, that I am reviewing but the band’s music. The cover says stoner and so does the press material, and so does my own ears when listening to the album.

So it is stoner, with inspirations from the likes of Black Sabbath and Monster Magnet along with plenty of stoner bands. I would say that they sound a little bit like the archetype for the stoner genre, like you imagine that a fictional standardised stoner album would sound. The powerful stoner riffs, the massing vocals and the nod back to past glories, yes it sounds like your typical stoner rock/metal thing. There are no adventurous excursions or dramatic songs; it is just the sound that feels so familiar for the stoner genre. This you will hear on five tracks that take a bit over 25 minutes to go through.

It is a solid effort, but it also feels a bit like cutting the grass with a less than sharp scythe. I think this release is doomed to obscurity as there isn’t anything to set it apart from other stoner bands and the name will make it even easier to forget. They could have dared more, it is possible to make fresh sounding stuff in this genre but these guys don’t really manage to do that – they just play it safe, making this a good but not a very exciting album.

Fresh Grass shows that Grass knows how to make stoner, but they need to make it a bit more personal if they want to be noticed. Perhaps it is something we will hear the next time, when they release the new album that they are working on at the moment. I hope that will be more exciting because as good as this album is, it will probably have been long forgotten when the new album is released.

HHHHHHH