80

80. Himalayan - Band of Skulls (2014)

Rock

Himalayan is probably the most appropriate adjective for Band of Skulls’ sound. The Southampton trio’s guitars build “slow like a glacier” and then rise suddenly to towering heights with Russell Marsden and Emma Richardson’s voices often intertwined and projecting out from the mountaintop over the landscape below.

Aside from the slow-burning “Cold Sweat”, in which Richardson laments the separation between her and her lover, the album barrels forward through a moonless night with the pedal on the floor. The pace is unrelenting, and the urge to stiffen and dig your fingernails in never fully fades. The climax is “I Feel Like Ten Men Nine Dead and One Dying”, a neo-Western canticle that would hardly have felt out of place on the Natural Born Killers soundtrack. The chorus hits line after line, like tidal waves crashing on a beach. When it finally recedes, you feel eroded, but oddly revitalized and wanting more.

*image; cover art for the album Himalayan by the artist Band of Skulls