czar rose - death honey

Czar Rose

death honey
self-released; 2014

4.0 out of 5

By Ted Rogen

You could accuse the two-piece Czar Rose of experimenting with too many genres on their excellent album death honey but when you make songs this impressive who cares. They mix and match genres like trip-hop with drone metal and glitch. I hear influences from artists like Massive Attack, The Knife, Aphex Twin and it all sounds damn good to my ear. One thing this music isn't is poppy. You won't find any dance song like that from Passion Pit or Cold Copy. All the songs lean towards the darkness and have an ominous cloud that aligns the songs.

They get things going in a good direction with “comatose.” They mix electric guitars with electronics that would make Richard D James proud. The music is murky as synths slide and minute percussive elements cut into the mix as the vocals lay on top. It is great music to put on at two o'clock in the morning on a Friday night.

The second song contains a beat reminiscent to that of DJ Shadow or Massive Attack. I wasn’t expecting the rhymes to be spit over the music but that’s what I got it and I didn't mind it one bit. “path” is like a veil of Persian mist that sweeps you up in the desert while “saturday” creates layers of drones that may start to make you dizzy. 

So yeah they have a song called “pancake lizard” – deal with it. The song combines crystallized guitar with swoosh-like synth in an instrumental that you kind of just need to listen to in order to enjoy. They close with perhaps the most experimental song on the album. It sort of sounds like a Tom Waits song if he got into trip hop. No joke. 

After a couple of spins death honey isn't as scattered as you might think upon first listen. The two-piece delivers some fine dark songs that I think most of us will embrace.

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