We start with the answer to the question
‘what if Björk fronted a progressive stoner rock band?’. A late entry,
the second record by Sweden’s GAUPA is still growing in my estimation. At
times Myriad leans towards the more traditional end of stoner rock, like
on the infectious ‘RA’, which has a rolling riff right out of the Kyuss
playbook (stoner rock royalty!), but there also are much more intricate riffs on
offer (see, e.g., ‘Mammon’). Indeed, this record is mostly concerned with
pushing the genre. Take ‘Moloken’, which mixes stoner with something
approaching lounge jazz to excellent effect, or ‘Sömnen’ – sung in Swedish – which
is playing around with acoustic folk, and is haunting. As mentioned, Emma
Näslund sounds an awful lot like everyone’s favourite Icelandic experimentalist
pixie. Again, see ‘Mammon’ as a notable example. How much that is just a
Scandinavian singing style, a coincidence, or a choice is hard to know, but the
fact that Björk is repeatedly called to mind certainly adds to
the sense of adventure here for me. More generally, the appeal of Myriad is
that GAUPA are trying new things in a genre that I love but that has a
tendency towards repetition.