You may not have heard of the rock band Audrey Horne before, but if their second album Le Fol does as well worldwide as it did in their native Norway, you’ll be hearing much more of them soon.
The name may be naggingly familiar from its original context – Audrey Horne is a character from David Lynch’s cult TV series Twin Peaks. I don’t know about you, but I’m relieved to see a band making a cultural reference to a television series from the nineties rather than the eighties, and the logic is plain to hear – Le Fol recalls and updates the classic grunge-metal sound that was coming to prominence when Twin Peaks ruled the schedules.
Le Fol is largely mid-paced, and the songs it contains are based on the modern hard rock template – leaning toward the progressive, and ranging out further than the standard verse-chorus-verse-solo standards of old. There aren’t going to be any prizes for innovation, but their competence and ear for melody have already gathered Audrey Horne an armful of awards in their home country.
As far as mood and texture are concerned, Audrey Horne owe a lot to Alice In Chains. Le Fol uses the same sort of oppressive moody melodics and understated solo work that Jerry Cantrell still does so well, but Audrey Horne have a certain chilly distance in place of the sweaty swamp-fever of the grunge legends; guitarist Ice Dale is also a member of Enslaved, and brings a degree of that black metal technicality to the proceedings.
Singer Toschie’s layered and harmonised vocals also nod towards the style of Staley and Cantrell, though he can sound like a mid-career Ozzy Osbourne when he’s reaching for the chorus notes. The delivery is good enough to distract from Le Fol’s weak spot, namely the run-of-the-mill lyrics.
Audrey Horne have taken a magpie approach to their lyrical content, with standard pseudo-poetic clichés interspersed with recent borrowings; “Jaws” recycles a vocal hook from a Lostprophets tune, for example, and they manage to make a fourth-hand reference (a song named for a band named for a song named for a Kerouac quote) with “Pretty Girls Make Graves”.
But who needs originality from a hard-rock band when they can push the accustomed buttons with such skill? “In The End” may be a fairly derivative song when you look under the bonnet, but it’s no less epic or powerful a piece of work for that. Audrey Horne have successfully dragged grunge from its windowless bedroom and into the cold light of a new century, and Le Fol is the sort of solid gimmick-free rock album that we could do with more of.
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