There’s nothing more infatuating in music than a sound you haven’t encountered before, and this is what keeps us coming back to The Drools. Hailing from Perth, this three piece is the Frankenstein amalgamation of blues, rock, grunge and alt rock, as potent as cyanide and as addicting as morphine.
The Drools’ noise is a cocktail of grunge and rock spiked with a shot of the blues, a tasteful blend of what makes each individual genre so special.
Today The Drools drop their debut EP, a tour-de-force of the recognisable sound they’ve crafted for themselves. There’s no better term to describe the genre of the EP than what the band have dubbed themselves – ‘blunge’.
Opening track Sullen Scenes nails this experience, a noisy track that ebbs and bubbles with the sickening slow flow of thickened swamp water, malleable enough for the band to experiment but tactile enough to make sense as a well-constructed track.
It’s the exact sound that comes to mind when you spit out the word blunge, and the EP continues to be just as onomatopoeic throughout.
In My House echoes the sludgey vibes of Sullen Scenes, with deep, dirty chord progressions driving the track under Ben Salmin’s vocals, croony at times and willing to drop into an animalistic scream when things get a little more vicious. The breakdowns are utterly poisonous, a chemical drudgery that’s dangerous and attractive all at once, the sonic equivalent of a crazed ex-lover.
Following a brief foray into the softer territory of Everday’s The Same, The Drools bite back with all the force of a wild crocodile in the breakdown of Elephant In The Room, a distended piece of grungey meat hanging from the body of the EP, writhing with a life of its own.
Diabolical guitar work echoes through the latter half of the track, climbing to dangerous levels of noisey heaven with the deep drive of a rock solo and the emotion of a blues jam. Differ To Beg ends the EP accordingly, dirty guitars squirming under Salmin’s powerful vocals with the same liveliness the rest of the track list boasts.
The end result is an alarmingly creative debut, a bastion of adventurous spirit within a scene that so often repeats itself. The Drools are what Nirvana would sound like if you fed their whole band through a blues driver, and we can’t wait to see what they cook up next.
