Freedom Hawk is a Virginian 3 piece band clearly with a love of all things retro, psyche, and with a healthy regard of 70’s proto metal. So far, so good; these are all elements that should endear the band to the old long haired git typing this review as that’s what constitutes a fair old chunk of my music collection. I’ll be honest, that would cover the majority of the tapes and records I bought back in the day before CDs took over the scene, themselves now giving way to assorted downloads and streams. Credentials over, and onto the music.
‘Blood Red Sky’ opens the album with a couple of bars of thumping drums and a couple of chords that promise a stripped back garage feel, until 30 seconds in the riffs start and vocals kick in. It was that point I did a comedy double take towards the stereo, and checked I’d not accidentally plugged into a wormhole in time into an early Black Sabbath rehearsal studio! To say that vocalist/guitarist T.R. Morton sounds like Ozzy before he fucked up his vocal chords is to be frank, and understatement; hell, whilst not auto-tuned into a corner like Mr Osbourne, the echo effects in the chorus that Freedom Hawk use do sound straight out of his 70’s heyday.
This sound is even further exploited in ‘Journey Home’; I can only imagine that the riffs in this track were written on a left handed Gibson SG, such is the clear influence. Even the drumming has the cymbal heavy battering that almost a Wardism, let alone the occasionally jazzy bass line. Here’s where my problems with the album started to gel. There is nothing wrong with being influenced by the greats, and only the most up themselves of metal acts could claim that Sabbath is not written into the very DNA of the whole scene, but ‘Into Your Mind’ started sounding too much like a tribute act. I’m sure the said Mr Morton cannot help how his singing voice sounds, unless of course he were deliberately doing an impersonation, but by using the vocal phrasing that he does, complete with the near trademark staccato barks from the likes of ‘The Wizard’ to me sounded just like a lack of originality. ‘Lost In Space’ follows, and the slower trippy influences of ‘Am I Going Insane’ positively screaming for recognition. The one track that stood out as different from the rest was ‘Into Your Mind’; yes there was a lot of the same classic structure to it, but the I don’t know if another band member took over the vocals for the first verse, so different was the almost Cajun blues shout before the controls were reset to ‘Volume 4.’
Despite repeated listening to the album, I was just unable to escape the thought that this album needed to try and create their own sound, rather than sticking so rigidly to what is a tried and tested formula; everything sounded rather familiar, almost as if it were an album of covers, rather than a new product. Everything in me wanted to really like this album, or at least try and listen to it as a self contained recording, but having listened to Black Sabbath for a chunk over 30 years made that an impossibility. If, however, you’ve managed to avoid that band your whole life, you might well get more out of the album than I did. Yes, it’s well played, well written, and the production has not left the sound lending more to the computer than the musician, but it just didn’t gel with me.
(6/10 Spenny)
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