Labels: self released
Review by: Joe Callaghan
Acoustic jams don’t usually hit the spot for me, but especially not when they appear to be fronted by a thuggish sounding Ian Beale of sorts. I tend to expect to be pleasantly whisked away when it’s just a guitar and voice, but both the tracks from this home-made debut shout and yell right at me for a good 6 minutes or so. The entire article is desperately lacking something. In fact, it is desperately lacking everything. This doesn’t sound like an acoustic act taking things a bit too far, but a full band missing all the essential rudiments. The voice is brash, flat and snotty. The guitar stabs and scrapes almost like it is screaming to be plugged in, and the bass wanders rhythmically, in the vein that you would expect from a leathered up street-punk outfit. An approach to punk of this nature would achieve greater things if it aimed more towards One Man Army and veered away from Billy Bragg. After all, folk punk appears to have been and gone, and it takes something special to stand out from an overwhelming crowd of sound-alike’s when you’ve only got a guitar and a voice to set you aside.