Geezer play it fast and loose. They are dirty rough and tumble street ready hard rock out on Ripple Music, and their latest, self titled offering speaks to the surreal and psychedelic lifestyle that the band extols. The ripping chords of the opening track suggest that we are onto something a little different with this band, a group who are slaves to sheer volume and who seem ready to explode at any given moment. In a world of high speed collisions, broken hearts and fall aparts it's bands like Geezer who seem to be there to tap into weird and darker pastures. Their high powered guitar antics and fuzzy riffs make for a strangely addictive record that will see you delving into rock and rolls lurid past in order to understand the incredibly fucked up present. Despite their relatively limited musical pallet they manage to evoke dark sound worlds and communicate weird and demented imaginations from the other side. Imaginations that might have been better left forgotten… you gotta love it.
There is something strangely mesmerizing about how Geezer play music. While there certainly are more than their fair share of punchy riffs reminiscent of bands like Motorhead, they are unafraid to dive into Hawkwind centric reveries that suggest a rather different reality, one that is hard to totally wrap your head around if you don't have a background in this kind of music. The tripped out explorations that Geezer repeatedly dives into create a sort of magic realism behind the music. They give you something to feel washing over your being, and then that fuzz, that inescapable fuzz which seems to ring on now and forever buzzes its way back into your heart and reminds you that despite what you may feel in the heat of the moment Geezer are totally in control of what is going on at all times. Listening to this record is like taking a journey with an old friend and realizing that despite the pain there is a lot of hope going forward.
Perhaps I'm the only one who will get something therapeutic out of this record just because of how my life seems to have been so terribly caught up in stoner rock, but I feel like even your average music fan will be able to see that Geezer aren't just playing on tired clichés. Instead they are taking those clichés and proving to us that there is still a lot to be done with them. There top notch songwriting and delicious sense of grit suggests t us that this band isn't trying to pose as crazed rock and rollers but rather that they are those crazed dudes your parents warned you about. Sure they may like to sit back and smoke a jay every now and then, but can you really fault them for it? Geezer burn with a sort of rock and roll devotion that shows an incredible understanding of the genre from its earliest roots through to today and I can't help but to love it.
Score: 8/10
