Whatever happened to hard rock? You know, the hair spray-hogging old school stuff that set its foot firmly on the monitor whilst injecting Jack Daniel’s and shrieking some daft rubbish about strolling down Sunset Strip in a pimped-up Harley at the top of its lungs. Somehow, this unintentionally hilarious pile of pants has mutated to the kind of brooding, po-faced fare that Khoma indulge in on 'The Second Wave', an album that could well be mistaken for a determined world record attempt in sustained joy-dodging gloominess.
Gags, smiles and other manifestations of high spirits might be in desperately short supply here, but the Umea, Sweden trio’s debut platter isn’t entirely devoid of high-octane thrills. The cranked-up ‘Stop Making Speeches’, for example, gallops forth with a pummelling precision and earth-trembling dynamics resembling Radiohead’s ‘There, There’ turned up to 11 and beyond.
Unfortunately, Khoma soon succumb to an insatiable thirst for impassioned overstatement and excessive use of distortion pedals. The dreamy hues of Soundgarden-esque psych-metal on ‘If All Else Fails’ are dulled by vast chunks of dour downtuned riffola, and with the first single ‘Medea’ – a bit like the arena-hugging hugeness of Muse with the endearing daftness replaced by an inexhaustible supply of unsmiling earnestness - the album takes an irreversible plunge towards the kind of grey, nuance-starved, endlessly aggressive yet oddly toothless fodder that’s calibrated to woo the emo-metal masses, but is just about guaranteed to shoo away anyone longing for the odd ray of light to penetrate the moping, one-dimensional murk, as melodically endowed as it may be.
Which is a great shame, because when Khoma can be tempted away from their riff-laden formula for skilled but generic angst the results are pretty damn close to special. Take ‘The Guillotine’ as an example. Every bit as cheerful as the deadly title implies, the majestic track, enriched by mournful swathes of cello, is nevertheless a darkly potent gem just as effective as its namesake head-chopping apparatus, and ‘Hyenas’ and ‘Sleep’, the album’s two slow-burning slices of piano-led sad-core, are almost as good. But then it’s time to embark on yet another round of pained top-of-the-register wailing, vacuum-packed production values and turgid drama proceeding with all the subtlety and grace of a herd of stampeding buffalos.
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