October 15, 2020
Melbourne based band Shotgun Mistress has returned with the follow-up to their recent track Glorious Machine. Collide is another taste of the band’s forthcoming debut album due out soon and features some of the same characteristics of their previous singles, including Save Me from Myself, which went to No1. on the iTunes Australian Rock Charts and made the Top 40 chart.
Collide
Reviewer – Vince Leigh
The new track begins with a blazing guitar riff, which is then augmented by a few rhythm section thumps that herald the introduction of vocalist Glenn Patrick’s vehemently energetic cadences and his out of the gates confession that seems to set the mood of the track thereafter: ‘Save me, I’m killing I sabotage my life worth living / Hands were bound until you came around’.
From this point on the song thrusts forward, this combination of serrated guitar, melodic twists and turns and a blinkered pulse continuing to the final reaffirming distorted ostinato.
However there are a few surprises here, as heard in the second verse, where eschewing the expected treatment and merely repeating the elements of the first, the song is taken to another point with Glenn’s low register menacingly absolving the band of predictability and helping it drift a little off course, which is a good thing. The tendency to want to meet all the expected tropes of this genre must be difficult terrain to navigate, so bending it a little here and there reveals the band’s admirable efforts to reshape this adopted style.
There is a marked uniformity occurring here with Shotgun Mistress’ releases and again, this is a trait that a heavy rock devotee no doubt searches and longs for. Formulaic it might be but so are a great many classic hard rock bands, and great ones too; did someone say AC/DC?
Shotgun Mistress are gritty and perhaps cleverly brash but they differ from the aforementioned Australian rock lords in their spirit, they are less street perhaps because of their refinement and artistic choices but they pack an equal sort of unrelenting punch, though of course, they differ in many other ways too. Collide will please the multitude of metal music mavens out there, satisfying their need for new, clean, clear and punctilious hard rock.
Watch ‘GLORIOUS MACHINE’
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