Insidious - Moon In June - CD (1999)

Labels: 404
Review by: Andy Malcolm

I don’t like it when I have to resort to looking up a bands name in a dictionary to find out what it means, I feel dumb. So I’m not going to tell you what it means either. Ha.

OK, it seems you can just about slip an emo rock record by me these days if you do what Insidious do. That is, play really fast bits, have a hundred singers, do mad time changes, and just generally be pretty quirky. Hopefully it’s a natural quirkiness, but I’ve no way of telling. What you get is a sound reminiscent of the one Forstella Ford had on their CD, but much more together than that ever is. You got your Braid / Cap’n Jazz influence with the dynamics and multiple vocals, a Mid Carson July sound with the quieter parts, and a Spy versus Spy thing going on too with the huge guitars that rattle around, driving the songs from prettiness to power with an impressive turn on a dime precision. And you also got those cutesy boyish vocals mixed up with a lot of hoarse yelling, which again brings up comparisons to those affore mentioned bands. So chuck all that into a mixer and you come out with a pretty good brand of emo punk that has been done a thousand and eight times before, it’s just that Insidious get away with it.

Hardly an elite record, but at least they’ve taken on a style which isn’t directly ripping off one singular band. So, I’d say they are ahead of most of the current emo rock brat-pack by quite a way, but that means nothing in a genre which hasn’t seen a widely acclaimed full length album released since Frame & Canvas does it?