Reflex Machine
Interzone

How many bands do you know that can take the blueprint for heavy music and rip it to shreds? Is a question asked in the mail where I received this promo. Does that mean that they are thinking outside the box? It is an American duo who release their debut album Interzone, they have EP from 2017 and a split in their catalogue. I like the name Reflex Machine, it is a pretty good name – and the artwork of the debut album looks kind of great.

Sludge is the genre, a massive wall of sound is what we get to hear and that is more or less what most of the sludge is about. Not too much variation, they end up doing what many sludgers do and end up building a massive wall but not really adding any nuances to the songs and that means that it ends being a little bit monotonous. The vocals are grunty, croaking, something like that – and I think the album feels rather long, 46 minutes to be exact. It feels like more than an hour when I listen to it.

It isn’t a very impressive album, it is a bit boring but at least it isn’t a bad album. The cover art is quite cool, the best thing about the album. The songs need more nuances and more dynamic sound to avoid sounding just like a massive wall of sound. It is difficult to see who should really take to this album; it just doesn’t seem to target anyone. There is more interesting sludge, a lot of it. And I don’t think sludge targets a very wide audience, general music fans will probably not like sludgy stuff anyway. So who is it for? The only thing they accomplished by shredding the blueprint was a very strange wall, too massive and too dull.

I find it rather difficult to write coherently about Interzone as I don’t really think anything about it, other than it is a dull album. I wrote that it was boring as hell in my notebook the first time I heard the album, and listening to it several times since then hasn’t changed my mind. It is a pretty dull album and it is hard to really point to what it is lacking, perhaps because it is lacking in almost every regard.

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