Labels: Holy Roar
Review by: Joe Callaghan
Pointlessly long title that really puts all the baggage out on the frontline by pinpointing that at least one of Run Walk has a little bit of OCD. Too much detail. What’s wrong with Self Titled? If they already had a Self Titled record, then I’m not accepting that as an excuse. Rancid had two, and there’s probably not a single band more worthy of breaking the rules than one featuring Tim Armstrong, who willingly sold his songs to shampoo adverts. Punx most certainly not dead.
Run Walk are born into the very, very large family of unwanted bastard children of the Lightning Bolt copyists, cocktailed with semi-conventional poppy math-rock. It swaggers in and out of inaudible chaos in the Lightning Bolt mould, into a much more clarity-soaked disjointed twiddle-rock, close to the Tera Melos and Shield Your Eyes pulse. Run Walk attempt to be off-kilter, but the angular stop starts sound increasingly trite, and their faux-unpredictability begins to be very unsurprising. Run Walk boast a vicious, affronting sound. The brash distorted bass is menacing and brutal, and each fragmented manoeuvre is razor sharp. I just find their toes getting dipped into the progressively trendy mathematical time signatures incredibly unconvincing. An extraordinarily high standard has been set within the boundaries of bands that are set on dicking about with time signatures, and falling short halfway is bound to sound pedestrian. Due to their ominous and ruthless sound despite their minimal set up, simplicity would be their strength, basing conventional structures around their disparaging and unforgiving sound. Yet, implausibly they insist on making this entire record as awkward as possible, and falling way, way short of their far superior tech-math-mess-rock peers.