THE DEATH OF BILLY JENSEN

rom the homecity of the mighty Heisenberg, Albuquerque in New Mexico, started this extremely prolific duo of Chris Boat and Aaron Frale in late-00's.While Frale provides vocals and guitars, Boat appears to handle all the rest of the instrumental armour: keyboards, bass and guitars, while he also sings in Spiral's works.They made their debut via bandcamp in July 2010 with the album ''The death of Billy Jensen'', a weird concept album talking about the Jensens, living in a house in the desert and having a unique ability to bring to life exact genetic copies of of themselves, after the youngest of the family members kills all the rest and regiving birth to them.

Spiral displayed all the elements that more or less followed them in their career.The duo played a modern Psychedelic Rock, often led by heavier guitar tunes, featuring plenty of vocal distortions, always led by the raw electric guitars with some supporting keyboards and sinister, ambiental soundscapes.This might appear to be some great musc on paper, but the mass of sampled voices and the constant mania for producing downtempo textures and minimalistic images definitely do not belong among the album's peaks.The concept seems to lead the music here, the deep lyrics are supported by the appropriate soundscapes and, depending on these, Spiral deliver angry riffs, slow-paced lead guitars, spacey underlines and even orchestral atmospheres.The cohesion between the different climates is among the most efficient elements of the album, what really hurts Spiral's debut is the rather one-dimensional electric patterns and the lack of instrumentally richer moments.Lots of spoken parts, effects and the aforementioned ambiental ideas are closer to a film score and not a proper album to listen at home.The more energetic passages though allow the duo's talent to be unleashed and the potential is certainly there.

I can see this as the perfect soundtrack for a related movie, but for a regular album ''The death of Billy Jensen'' has some obvious flaws.Free bandcamp release, modern Prog maniacs should propably have a listen to Spiral's debut...2.5 stars.