Labels: Glue Industries
Review by: Andy Malcolm
I was a bit surprised to see this arrive in the post, as Kneehigh are a band from
Norwich and I saw them live for the first time the other week, and they didn’t strike
me as the kind of band that was ready to make an album. But hey. The other reason I
was surprised was because Kneehigh are total mtv-mo, a genre which us folks at the C
at best giggle at, and at worst make cruel cruel fun of because we’re bored and
stupid.
Open Arms is 8 songs of extremely straight forward and not particularly enthusing pop
music. And it’s not that well recorded either, with the flat sounding tracks lacking
the oomph and energy required to even make an impact on my world weary ears. It has
vocal harmonies that are reminiscent of post-beinganygood Get Up Kids, and lots of
chuggy riffage that a certain segment of the population go nuts for. Musically it
doesn’t seem all that different from the straight forward pop punk that was being made
in the late 90’s, except now it has slow parts and oh-so-wrought vocals to spice
things up. How times change.
Being an old bastard there is pretty much no way at all a band like this can appeal to
me at all (actually, the acoustic song on the end is decent apart from the snivelling backup vocals – they show a better understanding of dynamics on this song). It’s kind of the thing that someone into Busted might progress on to, as it has slightly more edge, but retains all the ear friendly poppy melodies. And that’s basically what this is – pop music. Which is fair do’s, there is nothing wrong with pop music if that’s what you’re into. It’s just this really is lurking a long ways outside the boundaries of what interests me and what this website is all about.