Saline, the debut album from Dead Hazards plays a bit like a thoroughly intricate journey back to the mid-90s Seattle grunge era. A sludgy, deliberate, and ominous set of boldly written tunes that showcase a band with grand ambitions and a set of talents to keep them on track.
A group with their roots in the village of Greenwich in London, Dead Hazards deliver music that is difficult to pinpoint in any particular genre. Taking pages out of grunge, sludge, stoner, prog, and experimental rock, the album also ventures into operatic territories as well as into the lands of metal. A varied album that is consistently heavy and punchy.
Saline is an expansive and ambitious 13-song album that takes all the time it needs to introduce us to the sound and to all the themes of Dead Hazards. With lyrics about disillusionment and detachment, Saline is as lyrically dark as it is musically oppressive, and it helps having a confident and charismatic frontman to push the process along.
The album’s sound is generally quite accessible for an album of its intensity. With instrumental lines that are well arranged in balanced mixes, Saline is a generally easygoing listen that leaves the actual songs and words to do all the emotional heavy lifting while the instrumentals remain tight, punchy, and intricate, but never abrasive or aggressive, which is mostly what gives the album such likeness to grunge. Revolving around the classic 4, the scruffy and heavy guitars play a litany of charming, ominous riffs that are followed closely by nuanced basslines and well programmed electronic beats, all supporting the steady stream of charismatic crooning from the outfit’s frontman.
Among the album’s many highlights in the inventive starting. ‘Rerouting’ has a twisting rhythm and a twisted riff that introduced us to the slithering, creeping feel of Dead Hazards’ music that will come to be a mainstay throughout Saline. ‘Unpaid Tolls’ is the album’s most aggressive cut on its first half. Track #4 features a militaristic march that ventures as heavy as album ever goes through its runtime. Featuring also some of the album’s most heartful yells, ‘Unpaid Tolls’ is one of the album’s heaviest and most intricately written cuts. A rhythm shift that happens shortly after the song’s halfway mark was the most surprising moment on the whole record for me.
‘Prime’ features the album’s most unique riff. An intoxicating cut that would feel right at home amongst other angsty and dark cuts on Nirvana’s heavy and dramatic In Utero, this song is slow and deliberate in its oppressive darkness. A sludgy masterpiece, the riffs on this cut are memorable and the vocal melodies and haunting. ‘Crippling Faith’ is worth a special mention as it is one of the album’s only 2 songs revolving around an acoustic guitar line. The deliberate tempo and generally softer pacing make the song sound like something Alice in Chains could have done.
‘Tourist Trap’, the album’s penultimate cut, the second song to be built on an acoustic base, and the album’s longest and most ambitious cut, is a pure delight. Going generally lighter instrumentally, with cleaner guitars, acoustic rhythm, and colorful piano sprinkles, the band managed to create a venomous, insnaring atmosphere that would land quite elegantly on any of Opeth’s softer and more melodic albums. A piece that proves that heaviness comes independent from distortion and battering beats.
Saline is a quite confident album that is polished, crisp, and beautifully put together. A great introduction to the sound of Dead Hazards that sees us jumping from one idea to another quite efficiently, it is an album that is bound to garner some well deserved traffic for the fresh name, and hopefully gives them the launching pad they need to write more songs and hone their craft even further.
