BERCEDES MENZ – Lost In The City

Lost In The City is one of those albums that has those potential “Original Soundtrack” tunes that can be heard on youth series like “90210” or “Smallville” for that matter. The album’s creators, the manic Norwegian group, Bercedes Menz, conspired and succeeded on making an album in the American spirit of Stoner/Hardcore/Punk and modernized Hard Rock. Taking influences from modern day Rock and Classic Rock such as Led Zeppelin through the mists of raw Hardcore Punk of the New York scene while smoking the green weeds of Stony Hard Rock as various as 70s and 80s outfits.

After issuing an impressive single, by the name of “Lucifer”, Lost In The City came out with a big bang of the band’s abilities to create variations within their listed sub-genres of Rock and Punk. The fact is that Menz did well on trying to incorporate some complexity in their musical compositions while trying to exercise the catchiness of genres’ riffs. To hold the American fortitude, they used a suitable sound production that was made of crunchy and trebled guitars, deep end bass and choppy drums.

However, with all the band’s diversities and their own way to upgrade the catchy American scene, something was missed in a way. Some of the songs are cool and flowing even with the progressed parts as unusual beats and sorts, yet, the craving to enslave the American image hurt more than came to be worthwhile. In several points of the album, the rhythms, with their complexity intact, seemed to lose themselves and on most occasions, they took a deep tumble down.

You can say that Lost In The City is a suitable name for this album because there is something lost here, not all of it, nevertheless not everything ticks as it should. “Lucifer”, which is front center on the album, is one of the standouts on this one; it has the edges of Hard Rock and Punk with great vocals and nice riffs without too much progression. With this track there are more fun flowing tracks such as “Killer Crack” and “Lay Down”. The best track on the album, and the one that employs with excellence some great complexities, is “Fucking Gun”, a great all American track with add-ons. Nonetheless, the closer “Gordon P.I” and the long running “Proved You Wrong” come to the ways of true tedious moments while potentials such as “Dead/Alive” and “Black Smoke” are only solid tracks that don’t leave any room to memorize.

Lost In The City is a solid start for Bercedes Menz as they try to sink their teeth into a musical world that most of its days were flowing without too much stops to do some thinking. Hardcore and Punk, for that matter, in most cases, are easy made types of music and the two are very close in their directions. The Menz tried to take these easy-made types of genres and molded them with Modern Hard Rock. The bottom line is that they more or less made it happen, yet they needed more time to perfect their efforts in order to insure that their future songs will not cause anyone to lose interest in them.

Highlights: “Lucifer”, “Killer Crack”, “Fucking Gun”, “Lay Down” and the instrumental “Changeover”.