When I agreed to review Quest for Fire, I expected it either to be some sort of prog-stoner-metal Tommy-esque concept album about Prometheus or a primitivist-sounding album made by the kind of people whose idea of primitivism typically involves Pabst Blue Ribbon and ironic mustaches. In actuality, it's nowhere close to either of these, and, pleasantly, it's much better.
Quest for Fire is a fuzzed-out, open-road sort of record with a sound that lies somewhere between "Born To Be Wild" and Automatic For The People, between the guitar heroics of Built to Spill and the primal kineticism of early Black Sabbath. At its best, the album manages to be all of these at once, most notably on the quick-and-dirty opening track "Bison Eyes." The dirty sticks around, but the quick doesn't; every other track on the album is over six minutes, and all but one of them is over seven. Too often, they devolve quickly into dirges, and the riffs just simply can't overcome the loss of energy. This is compounded by the band's inability to completely fuse the aforementioned influences into a single sound, often shifting disjointedly between them mid-song.
I can't get over the sense that this album is simply too much, too soon for this band, that they didn't have quite enough material and decided to pad their songs to fit a full-length. Still, there are moments of subtle perfection here: the opening guitar line on "Bison Eyes," or the way the sighing chorus near the midpoint of "The Hawk That Hunts The Walking" melts into the apocalyptic verve of the guitars.
There are enough of these kinds of moments here to suggest that, given time to grow, Quest For Fire could easily be capable of fully merging their influences into a consistently great, unique whole. For all its faults, this is a thoroughly compelling album; there are so few bands creating music this dirty, this primal, and even fewer capable of doing it this well.
1. Bison Eyes
2. Strange Waves
3. Hawk That Hunts The Walking
4. I've Been Trying To Leave
5. You Are Always Loved
6. Next To The Fire
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