Labels: Apocaplexy – Superfluous
Review by: Oli Saunders
Hooray! I finally got copies of this 7” today after it originally came out in March. I am a fan of this band’s demo, which I meant to review on CZ ages ago but never got round to it. It’s really nice to see a Malaysian band other than Utarid getting on a slab of vinyl too. Okay Orbitcinta Benjamin have been on a 12” split release but that’s about it – there are LOTS of planned split releases between bands supposedly coming out on vinyl but some of these have been planned for a long time and have not materialised. I hope they do happen. It seems that in a niche genre Malaysian screamo still manages to find a very small corner (though not as much as South America) – it’s god damn amazing stuff but because screamo is so saturated it gets overlooked. I hope so much that these bands can make it over to Europe and beyond to tour at some point.
As I put this 7” on there is quite a big contrast with the Joan Baez record I was playing before it. Gone are the insanely beautiful vocals that Joan delivers and the nice and simple but pleasing to the ear finger picked guitar. Instead we have, well the insanely beautiful chaotic mess that is emo violence. The Monaco Heartattack here advance their sound from their demo. It’s still the same kind of stuff, fast, short and messy, but it just sounds somewhat improved. Listening to it on vinyl is perhaps one reason things are better – the instruments have a lot more force than when I listen to the demo tape or MP3s of the music. But just the overall song writing and chaos is a higher quality too. The guitars and drums combine well and the out of control screamed vocals sound great over the top. The unclean sound is precisely how it should be, whilst the lyrics are pretty simple but straight to the point and honest.
Overall no complaints, it’s over pretty quickly (6 minutes) but that works pretty well with this sort of thing. I know the band are talking of releasing an LP, one thing I would say is that I think they need to get a bit more variance going for this to work well.
31st August 2009