Labels: Communique
Review by: Oli Saunders
I had seen 10” this floating around in a few distros as well as on Ebay but had never heard any of the band’s songs, so was unsure whether to give the record a chance. There is a hell of a lot of poor screamo about these days – I’m finding it more and more via Soulseek and blogs – people playing long drawn out post rock screamo with vocals occasionally shouted through a loudspeaker, WHY? And as I continue to find and listen to lots of other awesome music, I am finding there is less time to listen to screamo and hence you have to concentrate on the best stuff. However, my obsessive side kept pondering about it and temptation finally got the better of me, so I picked this up the other day. It’s on Communique who generally put out stuff I like and descriptions read that it sounds a bit like The Spirit Of versailles, so that was good enough for me.
What I now find out about the band is that they got together, wrote some songs, and then only existed for twenty two days in 2007 between their first and fourth gig; hence the band name. I guess they named the band after they broke up rather than planning on only existing for this time. During this period they managed to record five songs, releasing them a year and a bit later. The music is definitely not unlike TSOV, the guitars are very melodic, playing rather simple chords by the sounds of it, whilst high pitched screams are emitted over the top of this, sometimes containing a lot of desperation. To be quite honest though it’s a bit average and you would be better sticking to TSOV’s best output. I don’t feel that much emotion in some of the earlier tracks, it all seems a bit too laboured. The guitars are too repetitive and playing simple riffs over and over which are far to friendly rather than intense. To be fair the vocalist is going for it a fair bit but it just doesn’t quite work.
Having said that, I still enjoy it! It’s something I will put on now and again. The songs were probably written quite quickly and so the band deserves some credit, even though a record should be judged on its own merit and not how quickly it took to write. The second side definitely picks up too, first of all via the song ‘Disco Technology’ which plays like the first three tracks but is the best of the bunch. And then the final song ‘Harvey Sid Fisher Said It Best’ is actually pretty damn good. It’s got that typical end of album slow epic feel to it but the riffs are really nailed here and it all feels quite sad. Good ending. Overall I’d only recommend checking it out if you are a screamo connoisseur, but it does have a few redeeming features.
14th November 2009