Last year when Brant Bjork and his Bros released Somera Sol, it found the singer finally making his exit from the alt-stoner rock box he helped to furnish with Josh Homme in Kyuss for the grungier climes of Chicago-esque, martini-brandishing sardonic rock a la Urge Overkill. It worked—audiences cheered and Bjork seemed to take well to the poppier format. What no one could have guessed however is that, with Somera Sol, the singer was simply looking for (and found) another sound to abduct. Punk Rock Guilt finds the singer returning to the desert with his ill-gotten gains for a session. This time out, Bjork has spot welded the sounds he took for a spin on Somera Sol to Kyuss’ Desert Sessions to arrive at a sound that owes an equal debt to both but somehow comes out sounding an awful lot like Seventies Southern rock at its most bloated and elongated.
Mimicking Kyuss’ Desert Sessions releases, Bjork sings with a mouth full of sand through the duration of Punk Rock Guilt‘s eight tracks and the album does fairly smack of the Southern stoner rock tendencies (think “Free Bird”-era Lynyrd Skynyrd or Ram Jam) that wafted through those releases as well but, at the same time, songs like “Shocked By The Static," “Dr. Special," “Born To Rock” and the title track also have a deep and wide swath of ‘oh so cool,’ superior and sneering Chicagoan alt-rock running through them. The combination of those elements make for a record that’s intrinsically divisive; either you don’t notice or don’t care that you’re being patronized or you’ll find such blatant elitism both off-putting and annoying as hell. Either way, it doesn’t take away from Punk Rock Guilt’s obviously well-assembled song writing, it’ll just boil down to whether or not you think Brant Bjork’s retreat from the tight structures of Somera Sol to his established comfort zone is a good thing.
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