Audrey Horne-Youngblood

Napalm Records
2013



"Youngblood" is the fourth album from Audrey Horne. This Norwegian band, who formed in 2002, took its name from Sherilyn Fenn’s character in the cult TV series Twin Peaks. In spite of the fact that Audrey Horne features musicians associated with black metal, past and present members having played in bands like Enslaved and Gorgoroth, this is straight-up hard rock/heavy metal. Now, the story is these guys started off playing some sort of post-grunge/hard rock (comparisons being made to Alice In Chains, Faith No More, etc.), but here we see just good, old-fashioned rock. Listening to this one and I hear all sorts of influences, but I can't pin point them all and it's not really needed anyway. The band has a good sense of melody and knows a thing or two about writing catchy riffs. Both of those traits are always appreciated when your talking about rocking out over the course of an LP and still keeping things nice and interesting. I'm kind of surprised to see an act like this on Napalm Records although maybe it's just the label's name being the part that is throwing me off? Seeing "napalm" and then hearing honest and sincere hard rock is sort of weird. Of course that has nothing, zero, to do with the group at hand so who knows why my brain does the things it does? Just forget about all of that jazz and check out Audrey Horne if your in the mood for something rock-heavy, catchy and, as odd a description as this sounds like, convincing. These guys sound like the real deal.