Coming after a five-year hiatus and the product of a home recording set up, Diorama Mirage, the debut album from Croatia’s Media Stres (a play on the Latin phrase, Medias Res, meaning in the middle of things) is undoubtedly proof that things work out best if you take your time. This first album certainly benefits from the fact that no record label deadline or outside urgency was driving the process. The results speak for themselves.
Although it is easy to hear heavier influences such as Queens of the Stone Age and Audioslave running through their work, it is the band’s ability to head off down more experimental tangents that help them explore a unique sonic path.
Sure, the opener, “Paper Bridge,” would fit into the Sub Pop grunge stable from back in the day, but its songs such as “Malter Ego” and its staccato groove and cow-bell-esque beats, its spaciousness and more post-punk vibe that finds them at their most rewarding. And then you have songs like “The Subtle Art of Not Giving,” which pushes them into wholly new creative realms, reimagining, perhaps, Talking Heads as a hard rock band!
By the time you get to “Embers on the Ground,” it is evident that this is a band that has found new things to do within the rock and roll oeuvre. Sure, they can be heavy, technical, impactful, and big, but they can also be clever, something that has been missing from rock music for a long time.
Rock and roll isn’t a spent force; it just needed some smarter people to come along and realize that just being loud or velocitous is not enough, that it is about exploring new sounds and structures, about taking the genre into new places. People like Media Stres.
Website
Facebook
Soundcloud
Bandcamp
YouTube
Instagram
