Labels: MoonLee
Review by: Joe Caithness
The internet is pretty great sometimes, you can put a word into a search which you use to describe music and a bunch of names are thrown back at you for you to click on. It’s kinda hard to ignore a band called XAXAXA, it’s also hard to say it to your friends when you desperately want to recommend them.. (zar zar zar?). Being a total dork, and feeling a bit of a resurgence of this musical strain of punk rock as an influence on modern bands I popped “Revolution Summer” into the tag search on Bandcamp and it spat this back at me. Being completely unable to read the titles of the songs or album I just clicked play and sat back to see if this was indeed what I was looking for.
Literally about 3 seconds in I was ready to send a couple of text messages, post various annoying Facebook statuses, post in every relevant thread on various music forums and run out of my bedroom to tell my other half about this band. Sometimes I think bands have backwards engineered my own music taste, because this is about as bang-fucking-on as it could be for me. The music is driving, melodic, pounding, passionate.. pulling on the heartstrings hard, while at the same time inducing a thousand pogos and fist pumps. The sounds of the vocals and instruments are so clean and jangly, every tiny melodic shift perceivable, the bass is gargling and stabbing you in the chest, the vocals are bang on tuneful and layered for pop perfection at the same time.
Musical cues? Imagine Rites of Spring song structures with the melody and vocal delivery of 90s emo infused melodic punk like Italy’s Eversor or the UK’s Broccoli, but with subtle switch ups to a rawkus Wipers/Naked Raygun esque mid paced punk rock sound, which constantly teeters on the edge.
Yeah it’s really good like.