Sweetheart - Art Is Dead Is Dead - CD (2005)

Labels: perpetual motion machine
Review by: Andy Malcolm

Poor old Arthur.

I enjoyed a 7″ by Sweetheart from last year, and here we get two songs off that squeezed together with four new ones. The first track is the excellent “Am I Saying Tight Too Much?” which I enjoyed at the time and still do. It’s like a mathier Lovesick spazzing out some Party of Helicopters rhythms, everything is melodic and excitable, with twisty guitars and great vocals. Love the part where it mellows out before it comes blasting back. “Oh Snap” follows directly and keeps up the fact that they sound like old Party of Helicopters with Fred Thomas singing for them. That’s a good thing in my book! Even the screamy bits sound like Fred, it’s a bit spooky. Then we get The third song is a mess initially, with some horrible screamo type things going on, before going all nice and twinkly indie, then getting a bit rubbish again at the end. Hmm. After that is the other song of the 7″, “This Song Is About Arms”, and I am not really into this one either. The cd redeems itself with “Fast Times At Right Now”, although the vocals are totally buried in the mix. It has a nice rumbling sound, and the desperate screamy vocals sound really cool. Shame I can hardly hear them. I reckon this track would be like Sinaloa if I could hear the singing. One more tune after that, “I Truly Love You But I Cannot Sing…”, ah, it’s an instrumental. And a pretty cool one at that, though it sounds like it should have vocals. There’s also some video on this cd for a few things, but I didn’t check those out as I am not really interested in band videos. That might be something that interests others though.

Ok, so there are some good moments here and some others that I am not into. There’s two really good songs, and one that I think would be really good if I could hear the vocals. A promising band, but this perhaps should have been a demo rather than a full release.