Labels: Slave Union
Review by: Danny Parsons
Wowzer, hella release. Right, let’s start with the packaging for this piece. 500 hand-made covers and some (if not all of them) are made from recycled record covers (the one I have is Love Like Electrocution) “” nice and eco-friendly then. Anyway, they’re all hand painted with watercolours by some artist from Boston; the only negative point being, they’re a bit flimsy and I can imagine that over time they’ll completely disintegrate. Pretty cool idea though. Oh, and there’s a little booklet in with lyrics and a fancy drawing of some bloke crying on. Thumbs up!
The songs then; whereas the previous releases with L’Antietam were pretty widdly fiddly, this album seems to have gone for a more straightforward approach “” the first track – The Overture “” is surely testament to this. It’s now more hardcore/punk than the emo/punk that they used to be. This isn’t a bad thing at all and there’s still bits of guitar noodlery in places (in the middle section of The End Birth for example) but for the most part the band seem to have swapped the twinkly bits for messing around with time signatures and an overall more powerful sound. Super vocals from Derek as per usual “” kinda similar to Jay from Orchid you could say. Instrumentally this band are spot-on, an amalgam of all sorts; words really wouldn’t do them justice. The end song is almost seven minutes of pure instrumentation and it’s really great. No vocals at all and it’s probably one of my favourite songs on the album, if not ever. As you can tell, I honestly don’t have a bad word to say about them aside from the fact that I’ll probably have to invest in a new record cover when this one finally busts.
Oh, and the band cite Jermaine Jackson and R. Kelly as influences. Can’t be bad!