Workers

Workers
Bleeding Death Music

Feb 25, 2009 at 6:00 am

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Workers (nee Your Black Star) are a power trio in every possible sense: complex, loud and bold on their self-titled follow-up to last year’s Beasts EP.

It defies all sense that so many conflicting influences mesh so effortlessly. The bag of tricks seems bottomless: unadorned but effective acoustic strums, biting hard-rock riffs that echo Josh Homme, carefully swelling U2 crescendos.

The band is obviously ambitious and opulent without being pretentious. Jeremy Johnson’s voice restlessly undulates from mopey baritones to creeping metal wails with alarming ease. In using his vocals appropriately on each genre-jumping track, Johnson pushes the album from being original to being a band’s masterpiece.