The Drood - The Book of Drood

Twangy bass guitar and some light electronic notes lead us directly into the center of The Drood’s first track on their brand-new album “The Book of Drood”.  Psychedelic rock lost in space on a song called ‘Static Time’ with a gorgeous, ethereal atmosphere. I do think that the vocals get lost a bit in the mix as they are rather hard to hear and understand. Shoegaze guitars add to the overall atmosphere and despite my minor complain, it’s quite lovely and soothing. 

‘An Exercise in Simplicity’ lets the bass guitar sweep the track as small, xylophone like notes drift in the air like lightning bugs after a rain storm. Laxer in nature than the previous song, but the complaints about the vocals being lost in the mix still remains. I suppose they act as more of an instrument on this track, but if there are lyrics in the song, fuck me if I know what they’re supposed to be saying. 

‘Flanks of Hubris’ fixes the vocal problems as they come forward and actually pop out of the mix in between bouts of romantic psychedelic rock queues. ‘Determinism’ is an extremely trippy and slow song that almost serves as a nightmarish lullaby. Squeaky doors, crawling piano notes, and a whisper vocal presentation all lend themselves to that nature.  ‘Leave the Lights On’ goes back to the ethereal and dreamy psych rock premise that primarily drives The Drood while ‘Flags’ provides a dingier, dirtier eight-minute transformative song that gets grittier the longer it goes on. However, I do think that eight-minute length is also its downfall as the song did get boring after some time. 

‘To Fetch a Hefty Jeff’ let’s a cymbal take up a good chunk of the noise as samples are played with in the background and synths and guitars alike make an ambient atmosphere. Wasn’t a fan of this, however, as a majority of it doesn’t seem well thought out and doesn’t quite gel as much as I’d like it to; two songs mashed together without good result. There’s not much new or interesting about ‘Lunch Break’ that we’ve experienced so far to call it unique in comparison to the rest of the album. ‘Make Up’ is the final track on the album but doesn’t quite do a good job wrapping things up. The acoustic guitar in the mix makes no sense as there’s just random strings thrown in here and there; in fact, the whole track is a mess. It sounds like an improv session gone horribly wrong. The classic throwing shit at a wall and see what sticks, but everything’s falling off. A major bummer for this album as the rest ain’t too shabby. 

On one hand there are a lot of great tracks on “The Book of Drood” with few minor complaints in between. Sure, some of the vocals are hard to hear but they aren’t that terrible as seen on later songs when the vox do pop out. On the other hand, there are some tracks such as ‘To Fetch a Hefty Jeff’ and the just-mentioned outro track that don’t quite have a good melody or flow and fall apart upon hitting the play button. It’s the whole good, bad, and ugly situation. Listen to it for yourself, pick out what you do like, discard what you don’t, cause there’s bound to be something you’ll enjoy here.