Cortez: Sell The Future (Ripple Music/Salt Of The Earth)
It’s difficult third album time for Boston’s Heavy/Hard Rock five piece. Always a challenge for any band after the album you’ve been working all your careers before signing a deal, then the leftovers are finished, and they have taken their time putting this out, with four years passing since The Depths Below hit the decks. It was clearly time well spent, as the record is absolutely filler free. And HEAVY… I mean REALLY HEAVY. We are all used to that down-tuned stoner touch to the mixing desk, but these guys have really fattened up the gain and compression, so that even at low volume my stack was rumbling. And you know it’s good heavy music, because my kids told me to turn it down….
Firing off with the energetic opener No Escape, which is classic hard rock riffage driven energy, and dripping with Classic rock guitar hooks the album slows right down for the title track. Sell The Future is full of ire at the current state of the world, starting slow and cranking up the pace slightly to create some astounding pounding riffage. The lead breaks aren’t about speed and excess virtuosity, but drip with fat heavy melodic weight and really do the business, carrying the often quite lengthy instrumental sections effortlessly. Look At You turns the speed up again, and has one of the more catchy riffs and vocal hooks on offer here – and it’s a belter. I’m also particularly enamoured of Matt Harrington’s gutsy bluesy voice which compliments the soulful stripped back guitar work from Scott O’Dowd and Alasdair Swan.
Single Faulty Authors takes things back down again, with an opening guitar break that wouldn’t be amiss in a Southern Rock act, before taking a heavier down tuned trippy verse, shortly before bashing you round the face with a pure Metal brick of a chorus… and then back again. The anger continues with Deceivers, very much the theme of the album and once again a more emotive start to chugger Sharpen The Spear. The final pace flip-flop is the pacey Vanishing Point, which is by far the fastest track on the record before closing with the lengthy epic Beyond.
If I have a criticism it’s that the tracks alternate fairly rigidly between a fast one, then a slow one, but it doesn’t jar as the tracks are so richly crafted and mixed, and when they do really mix it up as they do in Faulty Authors, it just works. Uncomplicated and effective, less is definitely more on this album.
7/10
-Simon Black
