Aside from their intentionally amateurish sleeve art and logo – par for the course for such scrupulously time-warped retro-rock – there are aspects of Australian crew Tarot that might raise suspicious eyebrows.
They share their name with a well-respected Finnish band of some renown in the trad metal underground since the mid-80s, and this album collects a batch of EPs originally released on cassette in 2014, suggesting Tarot needlessly stretched an LP across multiple short-form releases.
With an arsenal of ancient synth sounds, faintly doomy riffs, Deep Purplish licks and wayward pedestrian vocals, Tarot have a degree of sedate antediluvian charm, and Dying Daze is a satisfying blend of pre-NWOBHM valve abuse and medieval fantasia.
However, this concerted reversion by twentysomething musicians to an atavistic proto-metal template that far pre-dates their birth is no longer the out-of-step novelty that it was 10 years ago, and feels redundant when we can just as easily access the original, superior 70s source material.
