Music review: Floor - Floor (2002)

Here's something by a very fascinating band I sadly discovered much too late. This reunion album of theirs is such an interesting "what if" in the history of pop music… but to explain it, I'll have to go off on a small tangent abount grunge.

You see, when people hear grunge, they think Nevermind-era Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains and maybe Soundgarden. But this is only the later, commercial face of the genre, what "real" grunge is can be summarized in two words: Sub Pop. Or more precisely, the sound that mixed the noisy proto-sludge of Black Flag, The Melvins and Flipper with mellower alt rock like Pixies to give us three landmark LPs: Nirvana's Bleach , Tad's God's Balls and Mudhoney's Superfuzz Bigmuff.

Floor (who made four LPs' worth of material between '92 and '95, place this in the timeline) evolved independently (I think?) from that scene, yet with striking similarities. While they also went for much cleaner vocals, they didn't go radio limp on the music and opted for a uranium heavy sound that's much more NOLA sludge than grunge's. And I mean it, we're talking Bullhead/Crowbar aka "neutron star" weight here. Maybe some early Helmet in the recipe too.

They basically went the Psychocandy route of maximizing contrast to make "pop sludge" but sadly never pierced despite their very effective formula.

A valid criticism would be that's kinda of lacking in variety, almost "one note", which made me appreciate the 32 minutes runtime. Between 8 and 9 for me.