SQUARE PYRAMID - Square Pyramid - ALBUM REVIEW
- Freddie McKee
- Jan 3, 2023
- 3 min read
SQUARE PYRAMID
Square Pyramid
St. Augustine, FL, United States
Square Pyramid have released their debut self-titled album and it's full of bluesy 90s rock tones, melodies and harmonies. The tunnelling and rambling 90s sound is distilled here into brash and warm chords that echo in your mind for aeons. But only sometimes. Other songs are sharp, witty, keeping you on your toes as their melodies wrap their silken textures around you and hold your ears to attention. It's wild and free and it’s honest rock. Square Pyramid keep to the root of their sound throughout, they throw in a wonderfully unique cover of The Beatles ‘Fixing a Hole’ and evidence their sound through its differences. Square Pyramid are loud, tonal, and open. They use melody as their driving factor throughout the album. The songs all hold their own characteristic, but there’s enough of a trademark that when a track gets moving, you can tell it's by the Square Pyramid.
‘Crimea’. Dark and tentative the song begins, harkening sounds from the Zeppelin, perhaps some Deep Purple. It's smooth and deep, the bass carving channels in the rock and roll. The guitars brighten the scene, their passes are enchanting, moving from beefy fuzzy riffs to open jazz-Esque chords. The vocals sit in the centre, proud and loud, multilayered and full of flavour. They speak to us, don’t get washed away by the happenings around them, they stand tall and commanding. This is but one of the sounds that live on this album. It's deep, emotive and passionate and it stings like love, love of the 90s, love of those big hit bands, the underdogs. I see a lot of those 90s heavyweights in Square Pyramid, and I am all the happier because of it.
Shifting the tone and vibe slightly over to the Americana side of things, ‘Raina’ adds a sputtering of laughter — a joviality and humility. It’s vibrant and feathered in its tone, the guitars are full of life and the bass bounces rather than burrows. It keeps you moving, dancing to the swaying beat, caught in a love song about a girl called ‘Raina’. It keeps that garage rock vibe in the back, you can tell that Square Pyramid like the authenticity of music to be at the core of their sound and you can feel it more than hear it. The hush behind the acoustic, the reverb from the snare, the warble in the vocal. ‘Raina’ is a song that flips the script and brings the sound itself alive. The slider over to American bar blues hits maximum when you reach ‘Thread’, a classic 12-bar track that knows what it's doing and it does it at a hell of a pace and scale. It's classy and has a little Stones about it, the righteous guitar solo to the swinging beat has a lot to answer for. It's tasty to the point of addiction.
In-between this shift from dark rock to American blues, Square Pyramid make some detours, they go off on genre-twisting tangents and the sound breathes anew once you return. ‘Titan’ and its atmospheric shoe gaze sound; ‘Way Back When’ with its 70s funk influence; ‘Riddled In the Night’ feels like Proto-Arctic-Monkeys, its contemporary construction mixed with its Chilli Pepper vibe bring it toward our modern pop-rock sound.
Square Pyramids’ self-titled debut is a journey into devotion. A friendship built this sound, as it does all music, but you can feel it here, it's too raw to miss. ‘Rose Hill’ closes us out, a song to reminisce to, a song to listen to in times when you just need to look back at what you’ve done, those you’ve loved and those who have moved on. A perfect end to an album that spans genres, decades, and all the chords of life.
