ALBUM REVIEW: Talons – Sidewinder

Located on the picturesque south-western tip of North Island as well as being the capital of New Zealand, the city of Wellington has a vibrant arts and culture scene – even the resident film makers have transformed part of the city into a colloquially known Hollywood equivalent: Wellywood. The city is home to metal and rock bands such as DEMONIAC, WETA and FUR PATROL, and now adding to this eclectic music scene is the hungry and ambitious SIDEWINDER. 

Since their inception in 2021 they have carved a place in the Wellington underground and garnered a reputation for monumental riffs, swaggering grooves and thunderous vocals provided by the newly recruited Jem Tupe. Now they return with their sophomore album Talons – the highly anticipated follow up to their debut, Vines. Channelling influences like KYUSS, CHURCH OF MISERY, DOWN and ORANGE GOBLIN, Talons is an album that is packed to the brim with crushing stoner riffs, thunderous doom, eerie psychedelia, lashings of delta blues and tinged with a bit of Norse mythology for good measure.

There is a new swagger and confidence about this iteration of SIDEWINDER that was missing on their debut. Talons is certainly heavier than Vines. With guitarists Ben Sargent and Thomas Rousell leaning significantly more into the sounds of the NOLA sludge scene for their heavy blues riffs, there is an emphasis on dynamic behind-the-beat grooves in the rhythm section which bassist Sean Fitzpatrick and drummer Grant Lister nail down from the outset, with the whole band making occasional excursions into stoner and heavy psych. While the songs are gritty and wouldn’t sound out of place in the NOLA scene, SIDEWINDER are set apart by Tupe’s vocals which channel the traditional rock styles of epic doom with a NWOBHM edge. 

Despite this, while the Wellington quintet offer up something different, there’s nothing here to really grab you. The album is pretty one-track-minded in the fact it starts heavy at a set tempo and doesn’t really go anywhere else. While you have brief glimpses of psychedelia and doom, they’re fleeting and lack the dynamic shifts and space that you would expect on a modern stoner record – with the only exception being Northern Lights towards the end of the album. It is disappointing, as leading singles like Disarm The King and Guardians show how much the band has evolved in the last two years in terms of their heaviness and songwriting. You feel like they’ve gone too hard in one direction in trying to emulate the NOLA sludge scene. Despite this, the album does have some well written NOLA-esque riffs that get your head bobbing along with ease – Desert Song in particular.

There is a bit of dissonance in the fact that the music has gone one way but the vocals are going another; there is a clash of styles in the sense that the primary focus is sludge which tends to go for a raspier vocal and not the soaring vocal acrobatics of Tupe. She is a very talented vocalist but alongside this style confusion, it feels like she is having to fight the guitar distortion constantly throughout the album, because of the way they have been mixed, it sometimes drowns her out. 

The album opens up with Guardians, a riff heavy, bluesy beast that sets the tone for the album from the second the first big riff slams into your skull. Wasted Space has more of a southern feel in its introduction before it launches into a big NOLA-esque doom riff. Prisoner feels more like a bluesy hard rock song and is probably the strongest track on the first half of the album where it feels like the band are all on the same page and deliver a tight performance. The Depths opens up with some atmospheric drone notes before launching into the familiar big stoner riff pattern that the album has fallen into at this point. 

The aforementioned Disarm The King is a short sharp burst of furious heavy rock and this sound suits the band better than the longer sludge tracks. Desert Song is the high point of the album, packed with groove and attitude, like the previous track it feels more natural sounding and showcases SIDEWINDER’s cohesiveness. Northern Lights is great for the first half of the song, but then it becomes more of the same, so by the time Yggdrasil comes around the album closer loses the majority of its final impact. 

Overall, Talons really is a mixed bag. You can see what SIDEWINDER are trying to do but it just lacks the clinical execution at this stage. Despite that, it is a pretty solid stoner rock record and does the job if that’s what you’re looking for. 

Rating: 6/10 

Talons is set for release on August 23rd via Wyrmwood Records. 

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