Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Wasteland

Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats drummed up a bit of hype over their retro psychedelic rock sound in 2015 with the breakthrough of their 2012 sophomore album, Blood Lust, and the greater increase in popularity conferred by their fourth album Night Creeper, the hype train of which I made the mistake of intentionally ignoring. But their fifth full-length release is here, and I’m here for it. And Wasteland is an apt continuation of the band’s riff-focused psychedelic doom. Not exactly the most original album in the grand scheme of things, the band still manage to stand out in the current musical landscape because so few others are really approaching this type of music the way they are, if at all. The epic opening riff on the gothically metropolitan intro track, “I See Through You”, is utterly delicious and the hazy production of the guitars and synths, the steady and unflashy drumming, and ghoulish clean vocals set the tone splendidly for the rest of the album, which is a small treasure chest of classic metal riffs and spooky psychedelic rock ambience. The second song on the album, “Shockwave City” keeps the riff fest going with a mid-paced main riff that calls back to metal’s 70′s and 80′s output before thrash took everything into overtly dark and aggressive territory, and the unmistakably Iron Maiden-inspired riff on “Blood Runner” is another guitar-driven highlight of the band’s knack for sharp riff writing.

The longer cuts on the album, “No Return” and the title track, however, do find the band working not working as well toward musical goals larger in scope. The dirge-y and eerie progression of “No Return”, centered around its menacing, gothic riff, is well-tempered but finds the band showcasing their inability to keep a singularly driven piece going for extended periods of time, until finishing with its sample-supplemented synth-y drone in a cop-out of sorts. Perhaps its just the slower, doomy approach that doesn’t work so well on the track, considering it does have the right tone and riffage to otherwise succeed.Perhaps it’s just not the band’s strength. The title track is a much less commendable or bearable slog, however, stretching out a lengthy, ambient, acoustic intro section for the first half of the nearly 8-minute song, and only really filling the latter half with slightly more messy, drum-filled ambiance.

The band do kind of get lost in their own mist on some of the later, less distinct tracks on the record too, with songs like the unimaginative, mid-paced “Bedouin” and the basic hard rocking “Stranger Tonight” not really bringing the energy or uniqueness that the previous songs had thrived on.

The album does kind of succumb to a bit of tonal and stylistic homogeneity that does hinder its ability to maintain its grasp on attention as it slowly obscures itself in its own psychedelic fog of fuzzy guitars and campy flanger-ish vocals. Nevertheless, Wasteland is an album that at least makes for a decently unique addition to rock and metal’s 2018 output, and is not just the kind of album that should be shrugged off as a retro novelty project. It has some good examples of tight song-writing chops, and the band does well with the more classic style of music they’ve chosen to play here. It’s not perfect by any means. It does lean heavily on the riffs the band brings to the table, and when they don’t add any worthwhile riffs to a song, it shows, and finds them floundering a bit through the atmosphere they are indeed doing well to cultivate.