Big Wreck ended a four-year silence with The Pleasure and the Greed, which sees the band still standing short of the heavy metal boundary line, even as the riffs grow harder and more mind numbing. Between the massive crunchy bits, with all their particular allegiance to
Led Zeppelin, the band serves up tricky and oddball prog rock elements, sometimes even wandering into floaty psychedelia from time to time. No matter what, though, the songs always fall back into the monolithic riffs and titanic, pseudo-
John Bonham drum battering, while guitarist/vocalist Ian Thornley (mixed a bit too far back) trades between
Robert Plant and
Bono vocal stylings. If the point of what you want is great big unsubtle crunching, then this certainly fits the bill (with the bonus of the clever bits), but the essentially monotone nature of much of the album will become wearing after a while; it could have used a few more variations and breaks throughout, or at least an occasional step back from the application of tall-stack crunch to everything. ~ Steven E. McDonald