Labels: Jealous Butcher
Review by: Tom Winter
Carcrashlander go discordant from the off with title track “Mountains on our backs’ oscillating between Pavement-esque sonic dissonance and hushed vocal patterns. Towards the end of the relatively disorientating opening song (which clocks in at a gentleman’s 8.09) a guitar solo appears. It’s pretty much modelled on something like Johnny Greenwood’s guitar work in Paranoid Android. Except rather than the digitally overbearing guitar lines being alarming in an interesting way they’re just flat out alarming and way too high in the mix.
So I’ve got Radiohead as a notion somewhere in the forefront of my mind and it’s proving pretty hard to dislodge for the rest of the record. In fact this whole review is forcing me to regress a few years in terms of the music that I mostly listened to. The vocals are relatively similar to something like Granddady or Magnetic Fields often with a double-layered effect dealing with low and high register. Problematically the instrumental parts can be a little rambling and present a tapestry of ostensibly interesting ideas colliding violently into one another. By contrast someone in the band clearly decided that any vocal involvement necessitated an abrupt slowdown in tempo creating a feeling of impasse.
Carcrashlander are a band who seems to have a pretty sound grasp of their influences and certainly some invention in the way they amalgamate them together. Although there’s a lot that’s interesting in here it doesn’t all hang together so well and the influences are prominent but underdeveloped enough for the band to occasionally feel like a relatively half-baked imitation. The record also has a really disparate feel throughout it with the songs not flowing into and out of one another or feeling like they developed organically “” for instance “Coast to Coast’ is the shortest song on the record and feels like a concerted attempt at something a little more direct and power chord orientated. It again has a guitar solo which, perhaps symptomatically of the entire album, feels clumsily layered over the top of the song and doesn’t bed at all well.
In Carcrashlander’s defence this record is quite old now and my suspicion is that they will get better and better as a band when their influences cease to be quite so conspicuous and everything will feel a little less derivative. Having said that it’s not that something derivative per se is a problem, it’s just that it’s a record which is derivative but in a way which hasn’t absorbed a lot of the good elements of those bands they admire.