Ones To Watch: Service Bells

Dealing in booming rock monoliths and sprawling indie epics, Aussie lads Service Bells don’t just sound big and loud, they sound friggin’ colossal. The obvious comparison is with Queens of the Stone Age, but whereas Josh Homme’s boys chugged away in a woozy desert stomp, this Sydney four-piece go racing through dark, dystopian underworlds, slaying demons with their mighty head-blasting riffs. Led by frontman Fraser Harvey, the lads cut their teeth playing in basements around the city and now emerge fully formed and on a mission “to guide your ascendancy to rock and roll Valhalla”.

Named after a Grizzly Bear song, their self-titled debut EP ticks with the gothic, cinematic majesty of Interpol, the strutting grooves of ZZ Top and the scorched doom of Earth, whilst lyrically wandering into a world of comic book surrealism and midnight menace. Featuring Gideon Benson from The Preatures, second track ‘Undertaker’ stands out as a roaring slab of manic rock theatre and creates a world of mob killers and shadowy B-movie horror villains. It’s almost like a modern take on Screamin’ Lord Sutch’s garage rock classic ‘Jack The Ripper’, only in HD and with enough grizzly thunder to shake the foundations of the Empire State Building.

Elsewhere ‘Callback’ provides a moment of ambient solace, but the barrage of pounding, rawk sprawl continues to hit hard and heavy on ‘Flood The Plain’ and ‘Those Crows’. Have a gander at the Service Bells EP before the band hit the UK for live dates in May and festival appearances over the summer.

Service Bells, the self-titled EP, is out now. Download it, free, here.

Catch Service Bells live:

May

Saturday 2, Alpha at O2 Academy Newcastle
Sunday 3,  Stag & Dagger Presents: Live At Glasgow
Tuesday 19, Old Blue Last, London – Presented by Vice and Live Nation
Thursday 21, The Tin, Coventry
Friday 22, The Record Store, Liverpool Sound City Festival

 

Kevin Irwin
@TrotterFist

Kevin Irwin

Kevin Irwin

Kevin Irwin

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