What a waste of time.

Not that the record is completely able to be shelved, never to be played again or anything, but how is this an hour long? There is an inordinate amount of time that is simply dead air. There’s no explanation, no reason, nothing. Just silence. And isn’t it music that we look to fill the silence? Seriously, there may be around twenty minutes of sonic minutia on this record; hell, there might be more than that. I couldn’t be arsed to check how much time was unfilled, because higher priority items like smelling my refrigerator to see if my bologna’s gone bad or pulling on a loose thread in my jeans came up during several attempted listening sessions for this CD.

Chingalera is a three piece that excels in banal sludgetastic rock. I say banal because the only good factor of their songs are the titles, and even those are mildly mundane. “You Were Happy When You Came in Here” is a sixteen-minute long exercise in how much they can try but fail at attempting to sound like Boris or others of the drone crowd. “The Endless Bummer,” once it actually starts (around the 1:20 mark), has an interesting riff, but the riff gets overplayed for almost eight minutes straight. To give you an idea of the record as a whole, those are tracks two and one, respectively, of the five-song one-hour-long borefest that is Dose, clocking in at around half the runtime for the CD.

What could have easily saved this album is a decent vocalist, but no – not Chingalera. Their vocalist sounds like he makes a living piping the lead singer from Filter for voice lessons. Thankfully, they use him sparingly and got some guest vocalists for the record (Pete Stahl of Goatsnake, Keith Morris of Black Flag, and Eddie Solis of It’s Casual). Even then, if they’re gonna go for guest vocalists on the majority of the record, why not do the whole record instrumental and slap some session vocalist on instead? It’s obvious to me as a listener that these guys are a little reluctant to use their singer, and with good reason, but it’s never an excuse for bad vocals.

I don’t ask for much from the doom/sludge genre, but there’s a line that Chingalera has crossed that makes me never want to pick up this record and listen to it again. Ironically, it feels like the namesake of the first track – endless. And what a bummer.

[Visit the band's website]

---

Comments