Hound
Settle Your Scores

Hound from Germany is out to settle some scores with their debut album Settle your Scores, an album with a nostalgic looking artwork and a not very impressive one at that. It sports a dozen tracks, anthems of immortal hard rock that invites you to be nostalgic and brings you off the leg with their immediate force. So it is another one of those bands believing that it was better in the past and copies their favourite music, this time it is with the Hammond organ and the seventies sound – next time it might be eighties or sixties or whatever, not really creative, is it?

Understandibly it is not much to write about the style, seventies hard rock with lots of Hammond organ and perhaps a little bit of stoner as well. Not really something that will have you take notice, it sounds like things we’ve heard many times before and nowhere can I detect any sense of creativeness or freshness – it doesn’t really feel like I am listening to an album I haven’t listened to before and that feeling is one that I never really like when I start working on a new album. And I would also say that this album feels a bit on the long side with its twelve tracks that melts together into a mass of seventies nostalgia, not the most impressive album I have written about this year.

Not really the most exciting thing I have heard in my time as a critic, and far from the best as well. It is a nostalgic journey back in time, a time that feels quite uninteresting really. Sure I enjoy some seventies music like Uriah Heep that can be said to be similar to these guys but it is usually more interesting when it comes from the guys that created this music when it hadn’t already been done to death. The good stuff is that they have energy and enthusiasm for what they do, some power and a decent production but as a whole I find this to be a very insipid release that tries to play the nostalgia card like so many other dull bands do.

Doubtlessly it is an album for the ones who enjoys the music of the past and wants all music to copy other music, so if you enjoy the music of the seventies it might not be a bad choice. But as a critic it is quite difficult to really think up things to say about this album, it doesn’t really do anything for me and I will file it away somewhere where I won’t find it again. So that settles my score with this album and the score is three.

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