It's difficult-- even for assiduous scholars of classic rock history (a breed that emphatically does not include yr correspondent)-- to write about unreconstructed modern versions of classic rock with any depth. Writers on classic rock tend to possess an abundance of trivia that can fill up word counts, and if these detailed minutiae often seem to convey more about the writer than about the music in question, due diligence can find fertile analytical territory in historical context and cultural memory. But if Cream and their ilk were a resonant moment, then modern facsimiles of same-- power trio Pearls and Brass, for instance-- are memories of resonance rather than resonance itself. But let's not talk about postmodernism for once.
So we're left to name-check the appropriate touchstones and to devise new ways of describing the same thing-- power, weight, speed. "No Stone" crackles with thunderous tattoos of percussion, lacquered bolts of guitar that ladder vertiginously, and mannish blues-rock emoting. "Black Rock Man" sets woozy string bends pitching over plodding drums in a sort of darkly coursing, gritty sludge. "I Learn the Hard Way" is twangy, undistorted blues, authentically spacious, and "Beneath the Earth" is stoner rock, albeit not the kind that interacts with being stoned in a more interesting way than any other sonic stimulus, but the kind that's stoner rock because people who listen to it tend to be stoners.
Such tautologies are endemic to modern classic rock. It's self-defining, a recursive circuit-- you can tell good rock from bad rock because the former rocks and the latter doesn't. I want music to interact with the moment we inhabit now, and the most frustrating thing to me about modern classic rock is how closed and final it seems, how unavailable to the living, breathing moment. Serious Rock Dude would argue that I'm over-thinking it, and he would be right. The correct response to The Indian Tower is to give one's limbic system over to it, blank-brained, but for me it's like watching a favorite movie I've seen too many times for its rehearsed drama to produce anything more than the mildest euphoria. Regardless, The Indian Tower rocks in the most literal sense of the word; if that means anything to you, it's really all you need to know.
