Labels: parade of spectres – React With Protest
Review by: Oli Saunders
I am loving this recent burst of awesome UK screamo. Correct me if I’m wrong but it seems to me that whilst US bands in the late 90s were
pioneering this form of emo, which you may love or hate, very few in the UK were experimenting with it at all. Even in the decade that
then followed, there seem to be very few notable screamo bands from these isles.
So it is great in my opinion that recently more than a few UK screamo bands have cropped up and sound fucking awesome! Battle Of Wolf 359
and Kaddish are two such bands, and here they share three songs between them on a split 7”.
First up comes BOW359 from London with two songs. The first, Neptune’s Navy, is one of my favorites of theirs. It rushes straight into
things – the instruments bludgeoning away and the vocals soon joining in. I love their guitar sound in general, the two guitars and bass
linking together and playing off one another. I’m not going to attempt to describe the actual sound but it is pretty distinct. There are
two vocalists in the bands, one male and one female, and they tend to divide up the vocals so that only one is screaming at a time.
Sometimes they join in together, which on this track is one of the best bits about it. There is a forty second period where the
instruments are repeating themselves and the vocals are ultra intense. Amazing.
The second song, In Search Of Gaia, also rages away in similar fashion. Little respite is given until halfway through everything quickly
tails off, leaving a rather gentle ending. Nice.
Flipping sides, we have one song from Kaddish who come from Dundee. I recall not liking this band that much when I first heard them,
which now seems preposperous to me as whenever I hear them now they are great. The song on this 7” is called Combray and is also a gem.
Jangly guitars and desperate sounding screamed vocals. The song goes on for four minutes and changes tempo several times, mixing in soft
and fast parts. Again there are two vocalists with one main vocalist and the other tending to do backup vocals.
In conclusion, this is a highly recommended split that was released by Parade Of Spectres and React With Protest, two labels that you
should be familiar with if you’re into screamo. Both bands have LPs in the pipeline so keep an eye out!
18th October 2008