Album Review: Broken Water - Tempest

If it is possible for a band to perfectly capture the intangible character and feeling of a place in the world, extract it neatly and put it into words and music, grunge rock trio Broken Water have done so. From Olympia, Washington, their second album, Tempest, is true to the heavy, melancholic noise-rock of their native Pacific Northwest; it's loud and proudly so. Yet while the stormy water metaphors in the band's name, album title and lyrics are well suited to their tumultuous sound, at times it's easy to get lost for something to grab a hold of in the maelstrom of Tempest.

Drummer and vocalist Kanako Pooknyw, guitarist Jon Hanna and bassist Abigail Ingram are constantly compared to their predecessors Sonic Youth and Unwound, and with good reason. Opening tracks Drown and Coming Down could easily sit alongside anything from Bad Moon Rising-era Sonic Youth, but then things get a little bit muddled. Their sound is transformed into a storm of noise with the constant pedal-board, tom-heavy rhythms and washes of noise behind a melancholic melody swirling the latter half of the record into a mid-tempo blur, with Some Thread To Connect, Paranoid and River Under The River just kind of grinding along. The exception to this is Chantal, which is a striking ballad with this goosebump-inducing, swirling guitar and soft melodic vocals from Pooknyw that play beautifully off the rest of the band. That said, Broken Water's Tempest is an enjoyable listen for fans of '90s grunge rock… if you can ride out the storm.