Album Review: Sheenjek – Unclever

Portland’s Sheenjek have just released their debut full length “Unclever” via Seventh Rule Recordings, the press release accompanying the album made reference to the band forming as a chaotic book club that degenerated into chaos, violence, substance abuse and, most disturbingly, a drum solo. I think we can take that origins story with a pinch of salt, but what is clear from exposure to “Unclever” is that Sheenjek are not your common or garden punk band, not metal enough for the metal scene, not punk enough for the punk scene, and not “post” enough to win over any of those scenes, but all of these elements are combined together in a blur of heavyweight riffs and angular post punk.

 

The Sabbathesque stamp of the album’s title track ushers you into “Unclever“, the metal tendencies are balanced against the distorted pound of their punk and alternative roots to create something that appears to straddle parallel worlds, a feeling that is only reinforced by the album’s subsequent track ‘Monkey Brain‘. To underpin that this is not just an exercise in heaviness Magazine‘s ‘The Light Pours Out Of Me‘ is delivered in sinister fashion, before the album descends back into it’s dark hybrid of decibel bothering influences. “Unclever” closes with ‘Bootlikker‘, a final sprawling acknowledgement of Sheenjek‘s influences with the song constantly mutating from it’s discordant and comparitively gentle introduction, through dark passages of rock, thrash, punk and post punk until “Unclever” closes in the intense fashion it began.

 

“Unclever” is an album that draws from many sources, Sabbath heavyness is combined with dark Slayer influenced riffs with the whole package propelled along on a wave of intense alternative influences, one that is punctuated with dark undertones of post punk. “Unclever” is an unrelentingly heavy debut, but if you want an album that resembles parallel worlds colliding head on then Sheenjek is a name you really should know, completely uncompromising, relentless and intense throughout the album’s forty minute run time. The crossover between the worlds of punk, metal and alternative is one that is well established, although I doubt that any have sounded quite like Sheenjek.

 

“Unclever” is now available on digital and limited edition vinyl formats via Seventh Rule Recordings.