Labels: Deep Elm
Review by: Tom Sloan
Looky here! A Deep Elm sampler! Inevitable ironic statements aside, I notice four bands I’ve never heard of here, making the prospect of writing some words far more appealing, and quelling the inescapable feeling of deja-vous that flooded over me when I got this through.
There’s a band called “Sounds Like Violence’ leading us off here, and far from signifying Deep Elm’s u-turn into the world of hardcore as their name might suggest, they play a mix of soaring indie-rock and tense mid-paced indie-rock with a bit of a twist: a vocalist who sounds a bit like matt davis on the last ten grand l.p. Whilst I prefer my pained, emotional vocals over music far less produced, and rawer, I have to say I like this band. If people are going to make this cleaner, more clinical and tuneful sound (oft referred to on these pages as “mtv-mo’), they might as well do it with a bit of sincerity and in an original way, and fair-do’s to Sounds Like Violence for doing so.
The fact is, they sound bloody amazing compared to Fire Devine, who do the exact opposite. Unoriginal, finch/Thursday type stuff, with pop-punk vocals, and “”oh no- screaming over that clinical, totally artificial sound the band and the producers’ computers’ have come up with, and what are again, basically pop-punk melodies. Burns Out Bright, next up, do pretty much the same thing. It’s not they style of music that annoys me so much, as the unoriginality on show from all these post-Thursday bands, none of which have written anything anywhere near as good as them.
Anyway, with a fair amount of my enthusiasm dashed, the last of the unfamiliar bands called “Lock and Key’ manage to rock-out excellently, sounding like a more melodic and poppy Hot Water Music, complete with gruff vocals. The song “2nd quarter broken’ is a lot of fun. This is cool! Very uplifting and melodic with a great singer “” this cheered me up. Desert City Soundtrack aren’t playing music to cheer anyone up, but they are playing music to bring lovely sounds to ears everywhere. Their piano led, carefully instrumented melancholy is growing on me all the time, “my hell’ and “drowning horses’ equally special songs that are finding their way onto a compilation as I type.
We get Slowride next who on a split 7″ with Eniac a while back managed to bore me to tears with a song with about one change in, that you have to wait the whole song for. Admittedly they are in slightly better form here; their second effort, “panther 1′, sounds like it’s been culled form the first foo fighters album and given a garage-rock makeover, and is ok.
After being heavily into Red Animal War’s last record, I am slightly disappointed with “satellites’ here from the new album. It sounds a little more straightforward and more like a regular ol’ rock song, with a shift in sound from “black phantom crusades’. The other track though, called “riot’, is darn fine. It has a similar feel and tone to the previous song, but just has that tenseness a dash of the unexpected about it, – an effect the band seems to be able to achieve quite brilliantly. It took a few listens but now I think it’s a pretty amazing song.
I gave the Settlefish album a fairly indifferent review last year, but the song “blindfold the leaves’ taken from it here, is reminding me how they’re mathy and jazzy version of deep elm indie-rock can actually be pretty invigorating, with the ability to rock out with lots of contained energy waiting to burst out. The second of their two songs though, reminds of the way they tend to get a bit lost in their song structures at times.
Thankfully, Surrounded don’t have that problem, with swooning little epics easily at their disposal. “On top of the world’ is positively euphoric, and “better not be so’ delicate and pretty. Benton Falls then concede two more of the songs to a sampler from their largely decent album “guilt beats hate’, meaning if you own two recent deep elm compilations you own the best few songs off the record, and you needn’t bother getting hold of it.
This sampler is free from the label (save for postage and packaging), which is pretty cool if you were interested in picking this up.