Special Features/Formats:
- Orange vinyl (Limited Edition)
- CD
Tracklisting:
Side A
- Die Slow
- Chrome Hammer
- Soul Taker
- High Reeper
- Reeper Deadly Reeper
Side B
- Weed & Speed
- Double Down and Let It Ride
- Black Leather (Chose Us)
- Friend of Death
Release Date: March 16, 2018
Label: Heavy Psych Sounds Records
Origin: Italy
Holy hell.
There are no other words to describe what I’ve just witnessed.
This might be the best debut album I’ve heard in a long time. High Reeper is one of those bands you have a hard time detailing without resorting to passionate expletives, but I’ll try my best anyway.
High Reeper came into life early in 2017 as they hit the Philidelphia stoner rock scene with unapologetic force. Fully embracing the stoner metal tags, High Reeper brings a fresh sense of fuzzy-groove-and-doom to the scene. The opening swing riff of ‘Die Slow’ immediately captures your attention with its fresh-faced groove, a quality every track has on this record in its own way.
What’s really masterful with High Reeper is their use of many different formulas in the ultimate concoction of their grand debut. Even with every song maintaining a stoner metal pacing each track has a very strong identity of its own. You get fast-paced doom-rock with ‘Chrome Hammer’ and moderately tempoed, unapolegtically pounding riffage of ‘Double Down’ and ‘Let it Die’.
It’s like a Baskin Robbin’s 31 flavors of stoner metal, even with the 9 total tracks. You have songs like ‘Reeper Deadly Reeper’ (killer track title, by the way); a slow banger that oozes doom from every orifice of its making, yet flows into a brutal groove-pound to punctuate the track with an exclamation.
Evaluating the musical properties of this band is a particularly interesting endeavor. Everything comes together in what can only be described as “pounding doom-groove”, which is interesting in itself because most doom is based in a certain forms of heavy grooves. High Reeper flips the formula on its head with doomed up grooves, and not groovy doom as it typically goes.
High Reeper takes the stoner metal genre by force and molds it into a beast recognizable only by one name, High Reeper. This is a band that’s primed to light the world on fire, and from what I’m seeing they’ve already lit the first spark to set off the inferno.
Now it’s time to stop reading and start listening to High Reeper.
- Ryan Falla
http://metalassault.com