WE – Smugglers

WE has, with a lot of help from producer Chris Goss (Queens Of The Stone Age, Kyuss), spent all their energy on finding the right sound for this album, Smugglers, the band’s sixth release. The result is a really dirty but sharp and heavy stoner sound, with a lot of roots back to the psychedelic traditions of the seventies … which is very, very cool. You’d be hard-pressed to find similar productions anywhere in WE’s home country of Norway.

What is not that good is they’ve failed to write good songs. All right, the single “Catch Electrique” sure is an unarguably catchy song, but it doesn’t represent the rest of the album at all. The rest of the album is over pretentious and lacks the fun part that makes the aforementioned single great. One song after the other is going from trying-too-hard … to nowhere. The musical skills of the band are hard to criticize, but the vocals are importunate and poor, and cause the songs to fail to reach their full potential. The close-to-ten-minutes-long title track may bore you crazy, and the melody line of the slow tune “Sassy Zazie” could have been written by any band in two minutes.

I saw WE live once. They ended their show with bringing in a belly dancer, they had honky tonk-ish backing singers, and even used a soap bubble machine (!) on the stage. Thomas Felberg, the singer, wore the most ridiculous headgear you’ve ever seen, and acted so theatrical one could wonder if they were serious at all.

In the end, WE are trying so hard to be flamboyant that they forgot to do what usually makes good bands memorable: write good songs!