Sleep In Your Honour is a well-crafted record that offers grooves aplenty. Disrule have done well to differentiate themselves from the legion of stoner-metal bands on the market, whilst sticking to standard genre tropes.
Release date: November 23, 2018 | Seeing Red Records | Facebook | Bandcamp
Nostalgia-tinged records can sometimes feel forced, especially when you look at offerings like Greta Van Fleet. Disrule‘s offering Sleep In Your Honour certainly doesn’t feel forced, even if at times the songs on the record do blend together. The Danish quartet unleashes a storm of fuzzy riffs on the listener; the album is smattered with 70’s stoner rock influences, with many songs worshiping Sabbath‘s sound.
The title track opens the album, and boy does it open quickly. Hitting you with a stoney riff and vocals immediately, Disrule does not mess about. The vocals are littered with catchy vocal licks straight from the off, leaving you singing the main hook back to yourself half an hour after the record finishes. It’s not a complex album, so don’t dive in expecting an introspective experience. This is a solid, blood pumping 40 minutes worth of record to get sunk into.
The band lay the fuzz on thick, creating immense waves of sound from the guitars. Despite this though, the vocals and drums are brilliantly clear in the mix, even while you’re surrounded by the fog of distortion. I’d love to see these guys live, because I can imagine they’d have everyone in the crowd banging their heads to the act’s often simple, but nevertheless effective grooves for the whole set. The band also employ some really tasty blues riffs, which feel unique and original, despite there being one hundred and one bands that sound similar to Black Sabbath and Clutch.
This album really needs to be played loud to be appreciated, and Disrule makes sure that you groove from start to finish. I made this fundamental mistake on my first spin, I was taking a short lunch in the middle of a stressful day and the album didn’t resonate with me in the slightest. Trying it out a few days later, with external forces influencing my brainwaves positively, this album soared up in quality, drowning me in thick, bassy distortion. I ‘got it’ from there on.
One of my favorite riffs is on the second to last song; “How You Suffer” brings the storming song to a close with thundering chords. There are buckets of that same groove in the doomy album closer too. The band play a winding, bluesy riff over the top of crashing cymbals and guitars. As it gets progressively slower, you get the impression that the band want you to have one last rip off the bong as Sleep In Your Honour grinds to a finish.
Compared to their previous records, Omen, Sleep In Your Honour is much of the same, but with tighter instrumentals, and better songwriting. Amazingly, the band only took two days to record the whole thing, and its come off brilliantly. This is straight up stoner rock, and it works a treat. This album is great fun, and something I’ll be sharing with my mates. Sleep In Your Honour doesn’t have many tracks that leap out at you from the rest, but you’re certainly in for a great time. Play it loud, and try not to care what the neighbors think.
