Floor

Dove (No Idea)
by Brian Varney

Floor‘s self-titled 2002 release and their appearance at the 2003 Emissions From the Monolith festival confirmed that this was a band I needed to know about, so I was very glad when this lil beasty appeared in my mailbox. Upon initial exposure, however, I was overtaken with confusion as things take an abrupt shift at a very specific point in the proceedings, to the point where it almost sounds as if a different band has stepped into the grooves and started playing.

The first five songs, which fall into the two-four minute range, are comprised of fine, concise sludge-metal, down-tuned guitars and huge downstrokes driven along by fairly brisk tempos, conventional song structures, and emotional, non-growly vocals. The confusion accompanies the sixth and seventh songs, where the band abruptly transitions into a minimalistic, Melvins-like drone state. The instrumental title track lasts a tortuous 18 minutes, but doesn’t feel longer than an hour. The final track reworks Joy Division’s “I Remember Nothing” as a 16-minute instrumental in which a single riff is simply repeated over and over and over… and over. There are a couple of points where the band threatens to do something, but it immediately returns to the same riff and drum beat. I’m all for radical reworkings of covers, but I also prefer that something new and interesting comes out of said reworking. And unfortunately, that’s not the case here.

Were I to grade Dove solely based on the first five tracks, the result would be unanimously positive. The last two tracks are skipped easily enough, but their presence on the disc is nonetheless a bit of a downer.
(www.noidearecords.com)