Labels: SuperFi
Review by: Tom Hughes
A fairly varied set of instrumentals from this lot, once seen on (whisper it) one of them Emo Diaries things, so tis claimed. No mention of sweaters or college towns here, however, as these boys seem to harbour a much more Rrrrock predilection, going for big stoner-ish riffs and pounding doom passages on the whole. Still, you can kind of tell they’re sappy sad boys rather than hairy rock bastards. the initial kick-in of “Sixteen and Three” actually sounds quite a lot like Hey Mercedes without the singing, more than it does the Sab or the Fu. It never really pounds *that* hard, and the sense of doom achieved is, it has to be said, somewhat short of inescapable. Elsewhere some quieter, tricksier parts merit a passing Fugazi comparison, maybe Cursive too in places. They can definitely get a healthy big racket going from time to time, and they do chop and change a fair bit, but it’s just hard not to feel like someone just forgot to mix the vocals onto some of these songs. it’s debatable whether there’s really enough musical content here to make them stand alone as instrumentals, especially if you start considering how much shit goes into a Don Cab or a Fucking Champs song or something. They also can’t hope to hold a candle to Arcwelder’s fucking brilliant instrumental “Cranberry Sauce” which I got to see them play live for the first (and probably last too) time last week and can’t stop banging on about, or indeed comparing barely-similar vocal-less rock records to. A short sharp live set of this would probably be fucking brilliant, but thirteen songs on a CD had this mind a-wandering sadly.