White Miles: The Duel

The Austrian boy-girl duo’s happy return.

By Johnny Sharp
( Classic Rock )
published
White Miles The Duel album cover

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After narrowly avoiding global fame for all the wrong reasons by supporting Eagles Of Death Metal at the Paris Bataclan in November, this Tyrolese twosome can thankfully concentrate on getting people’s attention in more positive ways, and this follow-up to 2014’s feisty debut Job: Genius, Diagnose: Madness does a tidy job of it.

The lurching heavy riff of In The Mirror typifies the visceral bottom end of their sound and their ability to produce stomping rock’n’roll when the mood takes them. Yet while they have described themselves as “dirty pole dancer stoner blues rock”, they’re clearly keen to explore murkier musical waters.

If anything, that causes them to lose momentum with the spoken-word Don’t You Know Him and the brooding, muddy groove of Heid. However, Rivers Of Gold then recovers the plot, building the tension up into a hollering mini-epic.

Johnny Sharp
Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock.