A ticking rhythm starts to click in your ears, evoking a time bomb. Before you know it, KYLESA’s dual-drummer team has exploded forth with a blast of toms and is quickly followed by the fiery, molasses-thick tone of guitarists Philip Cope and Laura Pleasants. Thus begins “Scapegoat”, the first track on the furious Static Tensions, the new album from Savannah, GA’s KYLESA.

The opening track is certainly one of the album’s fiercest, but there is no shortage of rage and riffage throughout Static Tensions. Every single track on this album has a riff or a hook that will get stuck in your memory, some moreso than others. However, lest you think Static Tensions is merely a superior collection of riffs, the band aims to prove it’s no one-trick pony. Several of the tracks demonstrate KYLESA’s expansion into more atmospheric directions. Effects-laden guitar melodies will pop up amongst riffs, such as the particularly epic melody in the song “Unknown Awareness.” Furthermore, Pleasants has now introduced some melodic singing into her repertoire, in addition to her characteristic banshee-like howl. The effect of this singing is to give those songs a brooding quality, matched by the fury of the drums and guitars. And as though that were not enough, the band has even expanded into some simple soloing, with the penultimate track, “Perception”, featuring a fuzzed-out pentatonic solo that sounds as though it may have been written by Tony Iommi in the early ’70s.

The sum of all these parts is a tremendous album that can easily be considered a candidate for best of the year and certainly KYLESA’s best record by far. 2006′s Time Will Fuse Its Worth showed signs of promise, but this album is promise realized.

Prosthetic

www.myspace.com/kylesa