Smoke on the water, fire in the sky........

"When Smoke and Smoke’s members shouted “We never needed you anyway!” when guitarist Nate Manny packed up his six-string and bid goodbye to the members of Dead Low Tide, they were 100 percent right.

Of course, the remaining members – singer Spencer Moody, bassist Mike Kunka and Dan Haugh -- knew what they were doing way before their most recent band split: Kunka and Haugh previously rocked their way through the early ’90s in the bass-and-drums duo godheadSilo, and the serrated edge in Moody’s gravelly growl was sharp enough to cut through the mayhem and din of three Murder City Devils full lengths. These boys make enough noise on their own without a guitar cluttering the playing field.

Championing an economic, crash-and-burn mentality (Love Suffers Long’s nine songs wrap up in less than 20 minutes) and bowl-bubbling low ends, Smoke and Smoke shows that, in the right hands, a bass and drums can be pretty darn versatile. Kunka pushes his instrument through a maze of distortion pedals on “Into the Smoke and Smoke” to make his bass sound like a severely de-tuned metalhead’s guitar, throwing down some stuttering riffs that, in other settings, would be perfectly accompanied by heavy head banging. In “Teeming with Eyes,” he swaps out the distortion rig for a rumbling, flanged-out tone that’s the cross between an underwater burp and Jabba the Hutt’s bubbly laugh. In “Boys, Books and Kitty Kats” he tosses out sounds that sound more akin to the sputtering last gasps of a sickened Korg keyboard than any stringed instrument.

While Kunka’s bass work – or, more accurately, his ability to wring out ungodly strange sounds out of his four-banger – form the basis for Smoke and Smoke’s distinct sound, his band mates pull their weight. Haugh hangs tough, dropping rhythms that churn and twist under Kunka’s idiosyncratic bass banging, almost, but not quite, getting lost in the noise. Moody, whose lyrics range from the vaguely menacing “Into the Smoke and Smoke”) to phoned-in, one-line monotony (“Strike, Lightning Strike”), adds a weird element of melody and order to the otherwise gleefully reckless Love Suffers Long.

Kooky pre-amp settings and rumbling melodies could wear themselves pretty thin (you do remember godheadSilo, don’t you?), but Smoke and Smoke’s wham-bam brevity keeps Love Suffers Long from wearing out its welcome." (review by Matt Schild).

Smoke And Smoke - Love Suffers Long:

(Thanx 2 RAMIEL)