Snowy Dunes
Satrugi (orange)
There was a time in the mid to late '70s when a modicum of mellowness and melody started creeping into heavy rock, it was a period that saw the rise of bands like Bad Company, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Boston and early Foreigner, bands who when called upon could rock like a cradle in a hurricane but also had in their locker songs that could tug at your heartstrings and didn't just rely on a riff to grab their listeners attention. Sweden's Snowy Dunes, Niklas Eisen (lead vocals, percussion, acoustic guitar), Christoffer Kingstedt (electric guitars, guitorchestration), Carl Oredson (bass, keyboards, mellotron) and Jonathan Wårdsäter (drums, percussion) do not exactly work from the same blueprint that those bands used to propel their careers into the stratosphere, Snowy Dunes' grooves are a little bit too gnarly and gritty, but they do bring to underground rock many of those same attributes of songcraft, melody and soulful gravitas that saw those other bands become staples of worldwide rock radio stations, attributes that can be found scattered quite liberally throughout the five songs that make up the band's third album 'Sastrugi.'