Album Reviews

Saint Petersburg, FL’s Orange Gravity started out in 2008 as a trio, but after having lost their bassist somewhere along the way, Robbie Salta (guitar/vocals) and Blake Smith (drums, vocals) decided to forge ahead as a duo. According to their bio, ‘they have since gone on to accomplish very little, but hope to change that now with a new found attitude of not being completely lazy.’

Opening track “Hearing Voices” starts off like a dysfunctional grunge meets punk tune with a nasty riff, raw vocals and drums that keep propelling the song onward. They take it as far as they can, before letting it drift off into what can be best described as an accordion-driven Spanish traditional. At least I think it’s Spanish. Could be Albanian for all I know. This is then followed by another freakout, before the song is laid to rest at around seven minutes.

You don’t get a lot of time to stop and wonder what the hell is going on, because by then “I’’m Afraid To Die” has already erupted into a celebration of feedback and manic vocals. Three minutes in, they wander off again for an acoustic excursion, only to pick things up again with another badass riff that sounds like they took a blues riff, put it in a petri dish and let it fester.

With “Morning In Amerika?” they serve yet another gloriously distorted mess. If some dude wandered up to me and started yelling in my face about how happy he is for 8 minutes straight, I would feel slightly uneasy. Here however, I found myself enjoying the hell out of this track as well as its follow-up, “Hate!”, that sees the band galloping off into the sunset.

Orange Gravity are definitely onto something here. If they manage to distill that frenetic energy of theirs in songs that are maybe just a bit shorter, they might actually go from ‘accomplishing very little’ to…well, at the very least ‘accomplishing little’.