Cost: $1.00
Prior to getting this, I only had peripheral knowledge of Jucifer from when they were signed to Relapse, since there would be advertisements and articles in the catalogs and on the website. Based on what I saw of the duo, I figured they would be some sort of avant-garde rock. If you had asked me recently about them, I would have said they seemed like good candidates for being a Southern Lord signee (I mean that in the most negative way possible) based on the kinds of people geeks who seemed to like them.
This is an extremely varied album, and while there are heavier moments, it's not a metal album by any stretch. It'd be easiest to classify this as indie rock, but when I say varied, I mean varied--plenty of pop, punk, and even folksy influences show up. The first two tracks threw me a bit as it's not until the third track where heaviness creeps in with some Sabbath influences. The chord pattern at the beginning of "Queen B" brought to mind Bathory's "Born for Burning," and the first half of the track seems like an attempt to approximate the sound of extreme metal by a band not in the genre. It also introduces Amber Valentine's harsher screeching vocal style, which seems overly forced. I much prefer her regular vocals and they work well here since the majority of the disc is rather mellow. Any other metal? Well, "Torch" is sludge/doom, and some of the other songs have Sabbathy riffs or brief bursts of extremity ("Fight Song" sounds like a '90s alternative song, but is punctuated with bursts of the harsher vocals I mentioned before).
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