Unglued Reviews

Melbourne three-piece Blacklevel Embassy’s debut full-length is a challenging combination of dense, angular, noisy art-punk and lashings of power-chord driven rock that’s difficult to parse at first – hell, even deciphering the order of the songs from the confusingly laid out track listing is a challenge!

Despite the quick pace of tracks such as Setup and the blistering Dallas F.B.I., the band don’t rely on breakneck tempos for their power, being equally content to slowly grind your face off with precision riffs on Woman, Here Is Your Son, or just lull you into a false sense of complacency with the muted Pa:ri:ah.

The eight-minute-plus Settle Down John begins as a whisper and builds to intense rock of Black Sabbath proportions; other tracks like opener Their Own Stars are equally forceful but usually far more concise.

Over its ten tracks, Baroc runs through a lot of extremes, confounds expectations and deliberately alienates listeners seeking a straightforward, undemanding listen – and that’s half its charm. For the last word, don’t take the atypically accessible and refined final song Closing Comment at face value: just look to the title of the pained, ominous fifth track: So, We May Very Well Have Built This City On Rock n’ Roll But Now It’s Turning Around To Bite You On The Ass. Damn right.

Owen Heitmann