Labels: self released
Review by: Alex Deller
With just an appetite-whetting two-song demo under their collective belt, Sequoia have kindly dropped this rather lovely, koala-adorned slice of vinyl into our laps. Despite having one foot in the screamy emo camp, Sequoia choose to look beyond their Portrait discographies and add something different to the mix, writing a batch of songs that work well as a cohesive whole but exist independently of each other, sounding like the band have more than one trick in their idea bag. “Untitled Pi’ is a brief, frenzied stab of a song that sounds somewhere between Frail and I, Robot, while the next track is longer, and follows a dose of emo terror with a sweet, mellow breakdown and some nicely overdubbed vocals. Flipped on its back and the record is all about flurries of strangled half-chords and beaten octaves meeting fiddly math-tinged riffs head-on, with a mix of rabid male and female voices sharing vocal duties throughout. The five songs fly by, short but most definitely sweet, tantalising in their urgent brevity, assuring Sequoia a place alongside those bands playing this music and continuing to make it worth a damn. Cross your fingers that there’ll be more on the way sometime soon”¦