Labels: Translation Loss
Review by: Alex Deller
Hmm, here’s a one: remember hearing this many moons ago and being terminally unimpressed when held up against the likes of Split Lip and Threadbare. Over time I’d happily come to chow down on the band’s sludgier, scuff-knuckled efforts but this ‘un stayed forever relegated to the don’t-bother bin and hasn’t been spun since. Now here we are some 13 unlucky years since its release and Translation Loss have seen fit to drag it from the doldrums of Doghouse’s relentless ten-year march towards shitty pop rock obscurity. On reinspection, “Variable Speed Drive” is actually sounding pretty darn caustic, its mathy guitar excursions jagging fresh holes in my brain and a raw-as-a-fresh-wound vocal delivery enjoyably frightful to the point where I can’t quite see how the college-going me can have failed to be impressed by something that was, as a rough equation, Don Cab gone Honeywell. True enough, with its singlemindedness and relentless convolutions it can all be a bit wearing at times, but when this could’ve represented a clear enough set of building blocks for the likes of Converge and Drowningman to play with it’s strange that the gears didn’t quite click and that it’s taken this long for a kinder reappraisal.