Labels: Big Scary Monsters Records
Review by: MH
I picked this record up at the recent gig these guys played in Camden. They had it on 3 different colours of vinyl “” mine is black. I went to buy two records as my friend Steve wanted a copy too. He loves a bit of coloured vinyl so I tried to work out whether he would prefer the turquoise or the red one. I thought he would love a bit of turquoise but he then wandered over and insisted he wanted the black vinyl too. Luckily they had a few copies left and we didn’t come to blows. There is no pleasing some people it seems.
I thought the first self-titled album was a bit of a cracker so they had quite a lot to live up to with this new record “” in my mind, at least. This one is also self-titled but can be differentiated by the different cover and song titles. They get proceedings off to a good start with the riff that opens “I Feel Exhausted”. The vocals come in early on and are understated and near enough spoken over that riff. The song starts to build slowly and then the drums and vocals burst the song into life. This song is nearly 6 minutes long and it’s really good. The bouncier “Queen Mary II” follows this. A number of the songs on here are fairly gentle and melancholy. “$1,000,000,000″ was streaming on a few sites recently and I wasn’t that impressed initially but it has admittedly grown on me since then. There are better songs to follow too. When the guitars get going and driving the rhythm on they really pick things up like on “Turn & Go & Turn” and “Big Hat” which both up the stakes again although the former has some odd guitar effects towards the end. They still have that familiar Promise Ring influence in the guitar sound on some of the tracks. “Big Hat” is a strong track “” the blend of that guitar sound and the understated restraint on the vocals is really cool and produces a sound that I really like. Overall, the vocals are a bit more restrained than on much of the first album and there are less of the bolshier choruses. There are a few bouts of everyone’s favourite brass instrument, the trumpet, too. As far as twiddly-ness goes, I know it is still lurking in there somewhere but it is limited to the background. The fuzzier guitar sounds are mainly absent which is a bit of a shame as that is something they are really good at.
This album is not quite as good as I was hoping but it is still really good. A little of the bounce and exuberance of the first album seems to be lacking but this has really grown on me since the first few listens. If I was listening to this as a record by a new band I would likely be raving about it and there are a certainly a few cracking tunes on here. The fact that I don’t skip any of the tracks and have been listening to this constantly since getting the album tells me that I must like it quite a lot. There are no gang vocals on this record.