3 out of 5

Label: Troubleman Unlimited

Produced by: Mark Bradin (recorded by)

Collecting a couple EPs of material, Slaves’ Devil’s Pleasures is a great album with several great songs that just can’t make up its mind exactly what it wants to be – dark, moody rock?  Chicago noise? – and so toys with its great songs in a middling fashion that isn’t well serviced by equally middling production.

Kicking off with the slightly glammy instrumental Oscularum Infamé, elements are added in to build to a crescendo that doesn’t arrive, the track hanging between drone and melodic in an intriguing fashion that could’ve been played up to better extremes – which we do hear a couple of track later on On Your Belly You Shall Crawl.  The elements explored here look forward to the much more fully realized incarnation of the band as Pleasure Forever; the best tracks on Devil (Slender Spires, Kill a Pony) emulate that blown-out sound of excess – noise, surging vocals, pulsing synths.  Elsewhere the ideas and rhythms are there, but like the opening, the group hesitates in which direction to take things – pursue the darkness implied by their name, maintain their more anarchic VSS roots – and wind of delivering 5+ minute jams like Name Of Man as a result.  Again, these are actually pretty great tracks, which should then theoretically add up to a great album, just the sensation that the concept wasn’t fully flourished weighs it down, along with production that highlights the wrong elements at the wrong time – it’s pretty when it should be heavy; it’s flat when it should be boastful.

I wound back from Pleasure Forever to pick this up and it does satisfy my desire for more material in that vein, but at the same time, this is one of those instances where I’m glad a group decided to re-brand themselves, as PF were absolutely an amped up version of some great ideas they’d developed as Slaves, and separating the groups by name suggests the band realized it as well.