Track Reviews // Sheer Mag - Distant Call


1st Single from Distant Call (Wilsuns RC, 19th June 2019)

Rock revivalists Sheer Mag have roared back into view like a Vincent Black Lightning over the Philadelphia horizon; announcing their sophomore album Distant Call with lead single Blood From A Stone.

2017’s debut Need to Feel Your Love delivered in chrome, leather and denim on the momentum of their 3 EP build up, bassist Hart Seely’s production fleshing out their garage grit into a dynamic mix of hard rock, power pop and proto metal – a blend they’re still intoxicating us with on this new cut.

Tina Halladay remains unmatched – wrenching her bleeding heart out through her peerless vocal cords. But there’s an ineffable personal and social awareness in her lyrics of defiant loneliness, hard struggle and modern dispossession that recalls ‘Say Goodbye to Sophie Scholl’ and ‘Expect the Bayonet’, highlights from the first record.

The guitars have the devastating crunch of Ritchie Blackmore, Thin Lizzy and their glam rock scions but it’s a less brash, riff-led tune enlisting cooing backing vocals and jangly, Rickenbacker guitar lines like ‘60s-era Byrds.

Robert Beatty’s artwork (known for covers for Tame Impala, U.S Girls and Ariel Pink) is even more the lysergic dream of a sci-fi paperback illustrator than its predecessor, alluding to the cyberpunk dreamscapes of Philip K. Dick and Ursula K. Le Guin.

It’s the hard shell of spit and dirt which fans know and expect, but it contains a warmer core of introspection in it’s sticky, tender centre. This is rock music staking its claim to the stage it drunkenly stumbled off years ago, like contemporaries including Idles and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizzard, Sheer Mag are doing it with a developed conscience in a fucked world. Two years on from their debut they say they’ve been “waiting to write these songs since [they] started the band” and, by the sounds of this single, it will have been worth the wait on both counts.

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