Review by: Oli Saunders
I managed to catch Mivains on Friday during their whirlwind tour of the UK and they kindly gave me a copy of this split for free, so it’s only fair that I now review it. Live they were pretty damn good, racing through their set in fifteen to twenty minutes; it flew by anyway. I know they have toured extensively outside Italy, it’s a shame that they could only manage to sort two gigs in the UK as a lot of people missed out. What I really liked was both their uniqueness, having a sound that falls under screamo but does not copy any other band, and the variation – lots of different guitar riffs, usually short and leading into something else of a different nature – the rest of the instruments are tight alongside this. As pretty much is always the case, the sound live was superior to that on record – it’s pretty difficult to get the messy beauty of screamo across on record whilst keeping sound quality high.
I reviewed the band’s demo a while back and made a mess of it, describing it as hardcore punk screamo crossover which doesn’t really tell an accurate story. I’m not sure if I want to have another go as I’ll probably get it wrong again. The guitar sound is quite thrashy, and hence very fast. The drums and bass are much simpler in comparison. Lots of stops and starts, but a good and intentional disjointed flow to proceedings. One song is called ‘Paul Ince’, an English footballer who spent some of his career in Italy, whilst the other one is called ‘Cantona (Sunderland (1996)’, after one of Eric Cantona’s best goals for Man Utd. I don’t know why I’m telling you this as the likelihood is that you either already contain this knowledge in your head or you don’t care.
Eucalypt play two songs too, and it amazes me how many (small-scale) releases they have out considering they only wrote 10 songs (and they broke up a few years ago!). To be fair, whilst these songs (‘Blackwater’ and ‘Theme’) have been released before they only appear on collection tapes / CDs. One of Australia’s best emo bands, having a unique modern style that uses no distortion. You have no excuse not to have checked them out already if you like modern emo, though the songs here are not their strongest in my opinion.
Overall a nice and simple release.
8th November 2010