Volume One

Album Review

Over the course of just seven songs, the debut mini-album from Austin, TX-based Lions boldly attempts to straddle the hard rock decades stretching from local '70s heroes ZZ Top all the way to new millennium darlings Queens of the Stone Age, while acknowledging countless touchstones in between. Both the driving opener "Metal Heavy Lady" and the more patient, hypnotic "Underground" feed off the latter's penchant for insistent riffing and explicit sex-and-drugs wordplay, while "City Beats" borrows their taste for falsettos and piercing nursery rhyme melodies. "Guns" welds Top's groovy riffs and blues-informed, self-aggrandizing sense of humor ("I'm the man!") to psychedelic fuzz rock licks, and the alternately moshpit-inducing and easy-swinging "Movement" bridges the gap with surprising agility. Then, the dreamy "Systems Down" elicits visions of starward-gazing '90s stoner rock bands like Fu Manchu and Nebula, and there's definite room for improvement, too — what with main man Matt Drenik's vocals sounding a little timid in the mix and "Come Around"'s inferior recycling of some of the previous songs' ideas. All in all, however, this is a very promising first step for the Texas quartet.