HEAVY WATER EXPERIMENTS

A real nice debut from Heavy Water Experiments; a duo formed by two of the four members of US act Imogene.

Psychedelic, hard rock with strong retro tendencies is what's offered on this album; with driving, energetic drum patterns and vibrant basslines as trademark parts of the compositions; with organ, keyboards and some nifty guitarwork catering for the rest of the details. Indeed, the shifts in style and energy are mostly due to the guitar, with a formulaic approach of using acoustic or mellow electric guitars for the verse segments of the compositions and grittier, distorted guitars for the chorus and instrumental parts. Worth noting is the absence of traditional guitar soloing too - for the most part.

The guitars and vocals add most of the psychedelic tendencies in these creations; and although variable in degree this is very much a heavy piece of psychedelic rock with the basic compositional structure of verse-chorus-verse being the main negative about these tunes.

Highly recommended to fans of vintage heavy psychedelic rock.

This album can be seen as the debut of that Los Angeles based duo although they have already worked together formerly named IMOGENE. Here we have melodic Psychedelic and New Art Rock bordering songs - sometimes similar to the earlier Porcupine Tree output but also coupled with an alternative touch here and there. One significant aspect to mention is the decent backing organ and electric piano work all over. Additionally arranged with sensitive vocals this is caring for a really nice somewhat laid back mood alltogether.

HEAVY WATER EXPERIMENTS offer a compact sound - you will nearly fail to detect instrumental solos (with some short exceptions from that rule as for the guitar though if you like to treat it as that). Many songs like the openers Goldenthroat and Mirror the Sky for example are having a floating (sometimes even slight spacey) fundament and also demonstrate an interaction of mellow acoustic and heavier parts mainly based on riffing electric guitars and a punching bass. Anodyne and Neverlove are coming near to a college rock attitude where songs like Clairvoyance and Otherland are sounding like the band was inspired by the Swedish band 'Anekdoten' for a while.

I would also like to mention the great oriental flavoured Octavian - very spacey - mysterious opera vocals are added, excellent bass and keyboard work - a surprising one and stylistically getting out of range. Book Colored Blue is my favourite - knocking at the ten minute mark and merging all the album's positive aspects together at the end. The song offers a wonderful jamming groovy flow, tension-filled - swirling electric piano, psychedelic guitars - last but not least nice tribal percussion adds.

Being aware of this album for a year or so I eventually came back to it from time to time. For one or two the songs may sound a bit unisono in the whole as for the drive and behaviour. I don't mind - like this special smoothy atmosphere with sense of melody they are providing.