Labels: Desertion – Dingleberry – Dream Comes True – Emotionally Unstable – Gehirn – Impure Muzik – Let The Tigers Out – Money Cookies – Orchid Scent – Pure Heart – Saddest Song – Still Leben – We Told You To Play Faster
Review by: Oli Saunders
There have been a lot of screamo bands in the last decade, which I still think is a good thing. Enjoying this kind of music and then being able to see bands playing (albeit, not very often) has been absolutely amazing. True, there are a lot of average bands, the evolved style is perhaps not as good as its hardcore origins, and the number of recordings has saturated the style somewhat, but if you pick the best of the bunch there is still a lot of worthwhile listening material. And, as I’ve said before, the same goes for pretty much every music genre that has ever obtained a reasonable level of popularity, from nineties emo to drone.
Farewell have kept fairly quiet in proceedings but their 7” a few years ago has been something that I have high regard for. Fast, chaotic screamo performed passionately and just done really fucking well. I should say at this point that to my ears the band sound a hell of a lot like Hyacinth. This may piss the Farewell guys off but come on, they must be influenced by them. That’s the only slightly bad thing I can say; it’s like a group of people wanted to play like Hyacinth, with each member’s nuances giving rise to slight differences in the style. I hope the band forgive me for saying this. Despite this, the music is absolutely top notch, slaying from start to finish. And whilst Andy Malcolm, Remi and others may disagree, it is as good as Hyacinth. Songs cover topics such as the DIY ethos, animal rights and prostitution; areas that have been and will remain important in punk. The record comes with a CDr containing the songs and a booklet with lyrics, and words from the THIRTEEN labels who helped put this out.
Overall, this is definitely recommended. If you are gonna check out only five screamo records from this year then this would make my list. The rest of the list would be made up of some of the following: the Resurrectionsts LP and split 10” with Battle of Wolf 359, the Hybris discography LP (though this is more in expectation as I haven’t heard it yet), the Daighila / Fanzui Xiangfa split 7”, the Kaddish LP, and the Grinding Halt / Drainland split 10”.
20th October 2010