Labels: All in Vinyl
Review by: Andy Malcolm
It’s Zapiain, back again, pretending to be Caustic Soda. Two songs of roughly hewn melodic punk with melancholy feelings. I definitely want to see this band play to 8 people in Norwich, and sort of stand there half way between the back and the front being into it, on my own, although Ian Cavell (for it is he) would be there too. We’d have a beer and nod to each other and say “yeah, these guys are really good”, and then after more beers we’d be talking about that Lovemen gig in 1998. I really like Zapiain, although they aren’t really doing anything that you can’t find on numerous UK melodic punk releases from the 1990s, particularly on Crackle. In 2014 though, the chances of finding a band that sound like this are relatively slim, so I am fully down with their nostalgia.
Canadian Rifle makes for an interesting companion. They blurt out some muckily recorded mush, very gruff and muddy, almost definitely recorded live. You don’t normally hear bands doing this thing and sounding so grubby, it’s normally all cleaned up and made far more palatable, but this sounds positively broken. That’s why it’s any good, and doesn’t sound like every other fucking beardy faced hoarse vocalled melodic punk band since whenever. The songs run into each other and the second one is called “Born”, and they just spoof “Born in the USA”, I assume this is satire. Good effort on the first song though, I need to give their recent LP another go I reckon.