Labels: Year 3000
Review by: Luke Younger
Another Scottish band! They’re springing up all over the place in Collective this month, following on from Aereogramme and Eska.
Anyway this is a release that I have been waiting for, for some time. Having seen this band play 4 times in the last year and been blown away each time, I was quite excited about having a listen to their debut record. It’s just a bit of a shame that on the first two tracks, there is a real problem with the mix of the instruments! Maybe you should totally ignore me, because I don’t want to put you off from buying this, and I am really fucking wanky when it comes to stuff like this but the bass guitar is turned up way to high in the mix. Okay that aside, I can actually get on to talking about the quality of the songs.
And quality they are. I think Stapleton are probably some of the finest indie-rock songwriters in the scene at this current time. Tracks like M is for Maps, International Departures, Shoulder Length Summer and Walter Brock Memorial Pool are sheer quality stuff, bringing to mind early Promise Ring, Braid and Superchunk. I think that the real highlight of the record is Learning Archery, a song which I could easily have on repeat for a good few hours and not get bored of. Wow. I also like the way that on Why Buildings Fall Down they really twist things up a bit and go almost math at one point. Something this band are doing incredibly well with a lot of their unreleased material which will hopefully see the light of day soon.
So all in all, a great debut record from this great band. The best thing Year 3thousand have released so far, and the best ‘scene related’ record I have heard for a good long while.