Canadian trio Heat are set to make waves with their first album. Following on from 2015’s Rooms EP the new album is an extension of the indie groups’ affirmative post-punk/laconic rock sound. Titled Overnight, with its radio friendly anthems the bands’ lite rock is like a S.O.S. to summertime. Filled instead with a grunge attitude that will assist you through the dark northern nights.
Heat are comfortable with what they play and the songs reflect this. Exerting a nonchalance that comes with practice. Although it’s only a recording the song structures are exquisitely refined to serve the pacing on the album while the instrumentation supplies a solid foundation on which to develop.
Overnight is a relaxing album despite its noisy edges. Its cool bass lines are complimented by spacey and dreamy hooks that ebb and flow with the sonic tide. Manipulating the listener like jetsam from a ship called life and stranding them on an island called song. Heat are far from harpies luring unsuspecting bodies onto their crowded scene, but there are definitive similarities.
With nine songs and a run-time of thirty-six and a half minutes the album delivers a short reprieve from the internal struggles of daily living. The band themselves proclaim that they started the outfit as an excuse to get together and drink and that sentiment is secured in the attitude prevalent throughout the tracks while it’s also one-hundred percent proof that you can distill good times into a consumable product.
Utilizing whimsical licks and embedding them in a solid framework Heat have got a strong debut album with a unique identity, and some might say it’s too hot to handle (chuckle), but while they don’t divulge any technical brilliance their compositions are interesting enough that any virtuosity would destroy the musical ecosystem they’ve engineered. These guys know how to use guitars to make addictive hooks and of that we shall say no more.
8/10
