The press release that accompanies Night Resident‘s second album, Darkness Is My Home, hints that the band might be Greece’s ‘answer to Ghost‘, which, of course, does them a great disservice by heightening the prospective listener’s expectations as to what they might be about to hear as they press play… Love them or hate them, the Swedish pop-doomsters brought a new dimension to heavy rock when they arrived on the scene, re-treading some tired old tropes and repurposing them for a new generation of rock fans. Night Resident, whilst certainly using a few of the devices employed so well by Tobias Forge et al, don’t come close to achieving the same sort of love-’em-or-hate-em levels of devotion or derision on this album.

Which is a shame, because in and of itself DIMH isn’t a bad album at all. Costas Papaspyrou (guitars) and John Tsiakopoulos (bass) both sing well, their voices blending well on standout cuts I’ll Be Free and Little Emperors of Nothing. And when John Davaris gets the old double-time snare going, you might well occasionally think ‘this sounds a bit like Ghost’; but for the most part this is seventies-inspired psych rock that owes more to names like Blue Öyster Cult on tracks like In The Mountains of Sorrow than any sort of Abba-meets-Mercyful Fate fantasia that that press release might have had you hoping for.

Left to their own devices, it’s highly probably that Night Resident will become something of a psych metal powerhouse in their own right if tracks like closer Hope Is Hard To Keep is anything to go by; given time and a bit of cash to fully realise the sound they are going for – the MP3 version of the album I was given to review sounds a bit thin and in need of some severe beefing up – there’s clear evidence that these guys have a killer album in them at some point down the line. I await it with keen interest, and hope.

Darkness Is My Home releases on May 21st.