VOYAGE

Big Red Panda is a stoner rock/psychedelic band with heavy leanings to space rock. The band comes from Portugal, but their lyrics are mostly in English. "Voyage" is their 2nd full length album, but they have also released 3 EPs between 2014 (when their debut album was released) and 2019.

The music on this album leans towards a guitar heavy rock, with standard meters and mostly standard song formation. The vocals have a lot of reverb and a little processing, sort of what you expect of space rock music, and the beat is mostly steady through the individual tracks, which is also something you would expect from the genre. The psychedelic aspect lies mostly in the somewhat hazy texture and the processed vocals.

The vocals are mostly shared by 2 members, many times both of them singing parts or together on the tracks. They seem a little sharp, especially when they sing together. This tends to wear on the listener after a while..

The instrumental sections are very rich and riff heavy, with solid guitar playing. That is the strongest point of this album. The album starts off with some heavy tracks that are quite solid, such as the perfect opener "Recognition" and the title track. This style continues through "Bad Blood Host". There are keyboards also, but they are mostly mixed down as the guitars are the main feature on this album. There is a deep, funky keyboard in "Atlanta", which also has more of a blues style, but you only hear it for a short time. There is some killer guitar in "Back to Zero Time", and the synths play a more important part here, but the overall feel of the songs start to suffer at this point especially because of the annoying vocals which tend to become more annoying as it plays on.

Quite frankly, I love the instrumental sections on this and feel that they are very solid and perfect for the stoner and psychedelic feel they are trying for. There are a few longer instrumental sections like at the end of "Distress Call", but most of them are too short as there is just too many vocal sections, and I feel myself wishing they would just let the music play more often.

The bluesy "Fugitive" is a highlight which allows more time for expansion of the track at over 10 minutes, and fortunately, the vocals are done by a guest. The vocals are a deep, Hendrix-like vibe which fit the music perfectly, and the guitar passages are very nice on this one. And the sudden tempo change on the last half of the track that sounds almost like a "surf-rock" beat is a nice surprise. But, the bad vocals come in at the end of the track and once again, I am left wishing that they would let the instruments just play it out.

So, I would have loved this album if the vocals were less and the actual music was allowed to play out more often. The best part of the album is in the guitars and the band no doubt has a great stoner/space rock feel, but the vocals just bring it all down. I understand what they are trying to do, but if they want to rely on vocals so much, then they need to make them less annoying so that they live up to the quality of the music they are trying to produce. Either that, or just let the music play.