18.

Cairo Knife Fight

Dream Season

This album’s cover and title made me think I was in for a bit of cheesy classic prog rock when I gave it a try (based on a recommendation by the all-knowing algorithm) in the summer. It’s not that. Although there are some progressive elements to the record, Cairo Knife Fight’s main influences are some of the best hard rock acts of the 90s. Opener ‘AFTERBIAS’ is more than a little bit reminiscent of early Stone Temple Pilots, and ‘You Want a Sign’ only just stays the right side of the outright plagiarism of Faith No More. Both of those tracks are great, if familiar. Best on show here by a mile, though, is the utterly incredible ‘The Violence of Action’: an 8.5-minute masterpiece, based around a single, deceptively simple riff. Very obviously influenced by the second wave of stoner rock (think the first Queens of the Stone Age album from 1998), I like it more than anything QOTSA have put out in over a decade. Indeed, I think it might even be my favourite standalone track of 2024. The rest of the record isn’t especially close to that quality, in honesty, and perhaps anyway is too derivative to be truly great. Even so, Dream Season as a whole is still worthy of its List placing (albeit ‘The Violence of Action’ surely cemented it). Everything here is made more impressive by the fact that Cairo Knife Fight are a two-piece and play live by recording and looping all of the parts to end up sounding like a five or six piece. It also helps that Dream Season is right in my music taste sweet spot: 90s rock just… rocks. That algorithm knows its stuff.