VOODOO ECONOMIC – SLOW POISON

It’s hard to really pin down the feelings this record presented on first listen, it is not easy to get into. To be fair, Sascha Ion has an impressive Mack-truck vocal style, ready to strangle you from the first track. It’s quite abrasive at first, especially when the whole band kicks in for Bury Your Words with their contemporary roadhouse rock. Deep Green Sea fairly quickly shows another side of their influence – a kind of left-to-right driving lament, in the style of The Bad Seeds or Barry Adamson, but with a curious lightness of touch, as though they’re all afraid to fully let loose on their instruments. Ion definitely takes cues from Joplin, Plant, even shades of Morrissette in her highly-strung rock yodelling. Freeway takes it on the lonesome highway again, and the over-used vocal technique of masking the verses in a distorted megaphone effect starts to get annoying. The songs do hang together well as a whole, and this could have been a powerful blues traveller in the vein of Dallas Frasca. But sadly a muddy recording and strangely disjointed relationship between the songs, the band’s performance and the over feel, means this album lacks the power it needs to win Voodoo Economic a wide network of fans.

**1/2