Moderate Rock

Narrow Head nearly pull off the perfect heist here. ‘Satisfaction’, the Texas trio’s debut full-length borrows from a bunch of great bands. Ok, so maybe borrows isn’t strong enough. This is a record that sounds like it’s been copied, cut, and pasted right out of the 90s. The hazy, hammering riff of ‘Necrosis’ owes much to prime Deftones, ‘Feels Like Sand’ feels like a tribute to Hum, and ‘Cool in Motion’ could be a lost Rival Schools cut. However, while you can pinpoint exactly where some of these sounds have been heard before, Narrow Head use their ill-gotten gains so efficiently, and with such glee, that it rarely matters. It’s not perfect- the vocals, although heard through a haze, aren’t strong, and every so often the record starts to sag, maybe just a side-effect of fuzz overload. But another neat twist or killer riff is never far away. To use a superlative from the appropriate era, this is rad.