Labels: Great Plains
Review by: Andy Malcolm
Whilst there is plenty of great melodic punk out there, you sometimes feel it’s all a bit one tracked – overdosing on gruff vocals, or poppier bands aping the Ergs, that kind of thing. It’s always a relief then to come across a new melodic punk band that does things slightly differently. Fischer is one of those bands, their releases are all endearingly DIY – hand packaged CDRs, simple but effective artwork, no Myspuds page, that kind of thing. In this day and age of over-saturation you can probably safely assume that any band without a Myspuds is going to be great.
Four songs on this 7″, Great Escape is the longest, it hurries a long with urgent vocals and lots of energetic guitar, dropping in little emo-ish elements of stuff like Friction which you just don’t hear any more these days, a twiddly squeaky guitar part here and there, squeezing some melodic mathiness into the preceedings. We Eat Caterpillars begins in classic midwestmo fashion with rolling guitars and boy-ish out of key vocals yelling over the top. It’s entirely rough and ready, which is just how we like it, right? Noises and Boredom clatters along, throwing in vocals from all members, no doubt they play this stuff to 10 people in a basement and everyone is sweating and singing along and bouncing off walls. Our Collection is probably the weakest of the four tracks, but still has plenty of pleasing guitar parts and hoarse vocals, and a super sweet slowmo breakdown at the end.
I am glad that there are still bands out there like this. They seem a rare breed, making music for the love it and not really caring if anyone hears it or not. The band and their label (Great Plains) really seem to be going about things in a spirit that you don’t often see from American labels in 2008…