Labels: Feral Ward
Review by: Alex Deller
Criminal Damage’s self-titled demo-to-wax debut was one of the unexpected highlights of 2006, its bovver-booted Blitz worship cutting a swathe through a sea of throwaway tat and identikit mediocrity. Expectations, then, were understandably high for this follow up, but, gutsy as “No Solution’ is, it somehow fails to straddle those same giddy heights. Sure, the chuggin’ guitars, burly vocals and rough n’ ready melodies are all intact, but the end result still sails wide of the mark, with not one of the tunes quite as grab-you-by-the-scruff anthemic or instantly hummable as those first raw cuts, the band sounding wearier, less hopeful and, perhaps, rather bummed out by their own choice of subject matter (war, unrest, the neverending desire for escape) this time around, making this a somewhat shakier call to arms than we’d all been expecting.