Labels: Philophobia Music
Review by: Andy Malcolm
This music sounds as mopey as you’d expect a band called “One Day, After School” to sound. That’s not the best band name ever, it has to be noted. The opening track is moody post rock stuff with downtrodden vocals, heading into a much noisier finale. I was more taken with the deliberate intro on “Black Mesa” (well played, nerds) where they bring into play spidery spoken vocals (can you have spidery vocals?) that are clearly leaning heavily on Slint but who doesn’t love a bit of Slint, I can totally get behind a band doing that in 2016 because everyone else is ripping off something other than Slint, and I’d rather hear a Slint rip off tbh. It’s a very slight, fragile song, the instruments waver and falter quite delightfully. Of course, that only lasts so long as it gets really noisy and riffy because that’s what boys in Slint type bands do, they love all that introspection and thoughtfulness, but, Ah! Ah Stew! They also enjoy being all loud and riffing the fuck out of their guitars to get rid of all that tension and pondering. “Higuera” is a beautiful brief interlude that features crickets, I hope they love a bit of Boys Life.
Ok, I’ll jump off there – five songs feature, of the 2 I haven’t specifically mentioned, one draws on all the elements mentioned above and the other is oddly jaunty, at least inasmuch as this band can get jaunty, it’s their shot at doing the goal of the month music for Match the Day 1996.
If your record collection consists 90% of indie rock records from the 1990s and nothing by Prince then this is nothing you have not heard before. I like hearing what I have heard before however, and therefore can give this a pretty fair thumbs up.