Labels: Polyvinyl
Review by: Andy Malcolm
Talk about preserving your anonymity. The cover of this CD – some kind of brownish / purpley textured thing. No band name, no album title. On the side of the box, in the tiniest writing ever, these ‘minor’ details are revealed. Of course, only an emo band would practice such self-effacing / pretentious (depending on your POV) behaviour, and that’s what Rainer Maria are.
You bought that Van Pelt album yet? You wanna substitute talky bloke for guy & gal vocals? Vocals that tug at your heart from every direction? You want to make it a little noisier? You got Rainer Maria then. Personal lyrics and melancholy tunes to drag you down, down, should that be what you want. Alternatively, a beautiful noise.
Like the Van Pelt, RM deal mainly in simple, slightly minimal songs, occasionally exploding into sporadic action with bursts of emo-rock. “Half Past April” establishes everything they do in one song. The noisy, shouty vocalled section, against the more subdued, less intrusive bulk of the song.
No bad songs on here, though admittedly once you’ve honed a style such as this, I expect it’d be pretty hard to mess up, as you can do virtually anything, and so long as it has some structure and ain’t ‘art’, it sounds awesome.
First time I listened to this, it rained. What an emo cliche. I’m going to put it on next time it rains too. Music for the depressed wuss in you. Go on, you know you want to.