Eternal Season

Eternal Season is the second long-playing album released by the Lille, Nord-Pas de Calais, France-based Glowsun, and it's just unfortunate that listening to their music isn't half as fun as saying the name of their hometown. Not that there's anything terribly wrong about the band's straightforward brand of stoner rock, but there's also nothing too distinctive about it either. Effective but all too familiar-sounding material like "Death's Face," "Dragon Witch," and "From the Sky" shamelessly pilfers the Kyuss songbook for every last '90s stoner rock hallmark — minus, more often than not, the vocals — in order to convincingly regurgitate their every growling power chord, wavering wah-wah pedal, and vaguely psychedelic/space rock nuance with studious respect. Beyond that, the malefic-sounding riffs of "Lost Soul" and several other tunes recall West Virginia's finest ever mute devil worshipers, Karma to Burn; groovy start-stop tire-burners like "Reverse" (a rare song boasting singing) and "No!" mimic Fu Manchu and Clutch in equal doses; and doomier efforts like "Thing" and "Sleepwaker" nod but don't wink at Sleep's mystical bong abuse of yore. Then there's "Monkey Time," which invites a family of damned dirty apes to indulge in all manner of unnatural substances. Missing anything? Nah, that about covers it. As forewarned, Glowsun would be almost clinical (even cynical) about their all-purpose stoner rock recycling, if not for the obvious jam-born nature of these cuts, so while demanding genre innovation from Eternal Season will surely lead to disappointment, listeners seeking homely stoner rock comfort food instead will have their expectations heartily satisfied.