Hallow’s Eve alumnus Tommy Stewart‘s Black Doomba label can regularly be relied upon to throw up interesting little nuggets from within the wild world of underground metal, and HolyRoller‘s larger-than-life new album, Swimming Witches, is just such an elpee… an opus which roams the starways, appropriating anything that takes it’s fancy and melding it into one of the most enjoyable – and certainly most listenable – albums of it’s type that I’ve heard in a while.

The rousing stomper that opens proceedings, Atheist Prayer, sets your expectations high, but those expectations are immediately confounded by the next couple of tracks, Stumbling Towards Death and Earthdweller; the band push and pull the listener through a wringer of responses – are these guys psych-rock warriors a la Blue Oyster Cult? gonzoid stadium rockers in the Kiss mould? It’s impossible to pin down exactly what’s going on. By the fourth track, Embrace, which sounds like Gene Simmons butting in to an Alice Cooper session and taking over, the realisation dawns that it’s probably best to stop analysing and just let the album take you where it, rather than you, wants to go. And if you do that, well, there’s a fine old time to be had by one and all here…

HolyRoller may not be exactly unique, musically, but there’s an X-factor about them that’s all their own and, throughout Swimming Witches they use that x-factor to major effect, whether it be in the form of Jason Kincaid‘s lairy bass, which prowls the background like something particularly lascivious looking for fresh meat, or the waves of uber-catchy bludgeon riffola pouring forth from the amps of Adam Cody and Jim Mayberry, everything here is honed to produce maximum pleasure to the listener. Don’t believe me? treat yourself to repeated listenings of the album’s standout track, The Deuce, for unarguable confirmation…

Cody’s imperious lead vocal presence is another reason you’ll fall in love with this album, but quite frankly, if you need ‘reasons’ when the pure wonder of tracks like With Time present themselves for you to simply wallow in their otherworldly grandeur without any trumped-up exhortation from the likes of me, Sentinel Daily might not be the web-based heavy metal magazine for you.



Swimming Witches releases on July 8th.