DOROTHY's 2016 debut,
ROCKISDEAD, kicked up plenty of Sunset Strip sleaze, a sensibility that is completely absent from its 2018 sequel,
28 Days in the Valley. Teaming with
Linda Perry -- the former
4 Non Blonde who later went on to pen hits for
P!nk and
Christina Aguilera --
DOROTHY strip away any element of down-and-dirty hard rock, preferring to create a heavy, melodramatic ode to Los Angeles. Lead singer Dorothy Martin co-wrote the album with
Perry and, more than that, she's adopted her collaborator's penchant for exaggerated theatricality. Her overheated vocals mesh with music that owes more to classic rock bloat -- think a hybrid of
the Doors and
Jefferson Airplane -- than '80s grime, so
28 Days in the Valley feels like it's drifting on its own in the 2010s: there may not be many hard rock bands kicking around in the 2010s, but certainly none that sound like
DOROTHY do here, as if they're a '90s post-grunge band wishing they'd been around in the glory days of the '70s, when rock & roll still meant something. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine