Labels: Cascade
Review by: Kunal Nandi
Quicksand get mentioned a lot in the blurb associated with this, and that can be a bit dangerous. Firstly, I still love Quicksand, so anyone purporting to be like them had better be careful they don’t ruin my expectations, and secondly, they were around a looooong time ago, managed to change the face of hardcore and left behind quite a legacy. The chances of some random band toddling along and doing the same is somewhere between zero and diddly squat.
But anyway, Panel (from Cardiff) do sound a bit like Quicksand, and although this album really isn’t that bad, there’s really nothing distinguished enough here to take the world by storm just yet. The songs uniformly start well, before the essentially simple ideas are overstretched and eventually peter out. Sometimes the music is undeniable, but the vocals are a slight sticking point. Halfway between singing and shouting, falling between two stools, with a touch of the Cobains about them. Nothing we haven’t heard before a thousand times already, and those melodies are just too tacked on, too unmemorable. “Smile” is probably the best track on here, probably because it’s the most extreme effort and has a few unpredictable twists to it. Not bad, but not great.