It’s a cliché to end all clichés that one should never judge a book (or CD) by its cover, although with the latter you often can. Thankfully, Crimson Star’s ‘The Olde dawg’ EP isn’t a set of pirate punk or shanty folk, but a trio of big, riff-crunching grungers that more than validate their referencing of Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters, Muse, and Black Sabbath (although they’re better than the Foos, nowhere near as bloated as Muse, and less steeped in psychedelia and occultism than Sabbath.
The chunky guitars are welded tight to a beefy-as-hell rhythm section and the songs here are keenly focused: there’s no fat, no extravagance, no meandering or anything showy, and they punch hard.
