There is a school of thought that says hard rock has to choose what it wants to be. It can be bluesy, or grungy, or psychedelic, or stoner, or classic rock, but surely not all of them at once. Masheena, plainly, couldn’t care less about that. On “Let The Spiders In” the Bergen quartet throw all of those things in the pot and somehow make it sound not only coherent, but like the most natural thing in the world.
Their debut “West Coast Hard Rock” made enough noise to suggest these lot weren’t just another band with a fuzz pedal and a nice line in retro riffs, and this follow-up backs that up in style. It starts in a way that tells you a lot. “Been Waiting” might begin with blues, but it is blues as Corrosion Of Conformity might have a crack at – heavy, muscular, and carried on riffs as thick as molasses. It lumbers in with real intent and sets the tone for a record that never once feels flimsy.
From there, “Going To The Mountain” is honestly as classy as classic can be. The bass on it is absolutely enormous – the sort of thing you could hang your winter coat on – and the cowbell deserves bonus points on principle alone. It has that old-school groove that hard rock lives and dies on, and Masheena know exactly how to let it breathe.
What really marks this album out, though, is the ease with which it changes shape. “One Eye” is astonishing in that respect, almost tipping into power pop in places until it remembers itself and swerves back into something far more muscular. “A Game You Don’t Want To Lose” merrily trots off down some kind of psychedelic road, and the joy of it is that the band sound perfectly at home there too. They never force these shifts. They just seem to understand instinctively how to make a song move.
There are points here where the ghosts of the 90s come calling. “Life Is But A Sin” has more than a touch of Soundgarden about it, and certainly something of Chris Cornell in the vocal phrasing and the song’s moody grandeur. The grunge thread doesn’t stop there either, because “Sara Lost Her Way” strips things back and carries distinct echoes of Pearl Jam in its acoustic-leaning melancholy. But none of this sounds second-hand. These influences are part of the fabric, not the whole garment.
Better still, Masheena understand the value of contrast. “In Her Eyes” offers a moment of proper tenderness, and because the album has already shown its teeth by that point, the softer touch lands all the harder. It gives the record a sense of depth that lifts it above being merely a collection of excellent riffs.
Not that the riffs are in short supply. “Riffy” is, thankfully, exactly what it sounds like – and on an album like this, that is no bad thing at all. It has more than a touch of Crobot in its swagger and punch, and arrives at exactly the right point to remind you that this band can still simply steamroller a room when they feel like it. Then “You Owe Me” closes things out with grooves that owe a debt to The Allman Brothers, and a playful streak too, with the line “you’re a man without honour and I am a man without a beet” arriving like the sort of lyric that makes you grin before the next riff lands on your head.
There really is nothing much to dislike here. “Let The Spiders In” is heavy without being one-dimensional, melodic without losing its edge, and clever without ever disappearing up its own backside. It sounds like a band with a record collection full of great things and the confidence to turn that love into something of their own. That, in the end, is what the best hard rock always does.
RATING: 8.5/10
