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“Frank is a high octane rocker who has a penchant for excellent production, impressively aggressive riffs, with a good ear for compelling bass lines and fun lyricism.”
Sometimes life gets away from you — things happen that shake up your life; you overextend; you overestimate the amount of hours in the day; you go and go; you burn out. In the music industry, it’s so easy to transform into a crepuscular creature, pallid and sensitive to light. A vampire, if you will. Which seems like an appropriate time to finally give an honest listen to Queensbury native Frank Palangi’s new EP Vampire, released at the end of August.
The five song EP contains an intro entitled “Tomorrow Ends,” three full length songs and an interlude titled “Life & Death,” and each track operates very clearly around a core throughline: the scary things we are (or are we?) when everything else is flayed back. The listener knows exactly what kind of hard rock album they’re in for from the first bar of “Tomorrow Ends,” which strikes with barely a snake’s rattle of a warning.
The strongest track on the EP is “RadioActive,” and that’s because Frank’s music is strongest when his vocal placement is more forward and he uses his grit as more of an accent, and less of it as a consistent feature of his tracks. The constant vocal distortion does him a disservice when his riffs are already very gritty, and listeners deserve to hear the good voice and vibrato that Frank has hiding beneath the gravel. The title track, “Vampire,” which directly precedes “RadioActive,” makes the contrast between the two vocal placements very clear, and that break from Frank’s grit definitely helps pace the album.
Frank’s love of horror also comes through on this album, and not just for the title and its track names. If you calibrate your ears just right, in his hard rock and metal chord progressions, you might hear a little influence of John Carpenter, or Danny Elfman’s more rock side.
Frank is a high octane rocker who has a penchant for excellent production, impressively aggressive riffs, and a good ear for compelling bass lines and fun lyricism. He knows how to shred, and push-pull you through a short story of examining every monster we might keep under our skin.
You can listen to Vampire on all major streaming services, now.
