Labels: Minor Manor
Review by: james pacanowski
First off, probably best to clarify that this is not a chiptune band. These chaps do not deal in that nonsense. What 8-Bit Revival do deal in is Braidmo.
Or at least they used to. The last thing I heard of this band was their CD EP about a year ago that was all rolling guitars clattering into Nanna-esque melodies. I’m not sure what happened to that band. Maybe they decided that they couldn’t do Nannamo better than Nanna so they tried their hand at MTVmo instead. So bouncing emo tunes are out and so are all the fun idiosyncracies that comes with it; the neat cracks in the vocals are smoothed over, the guitars no longer skip and tumble in that endearingly clumsy way, just plod, weighed down by their own over-production. It seems like they wanted to go for melodrama but it just sounds a bit flat and tired, much the same way the worst Planes Mistaken For Stars stuff does. Perhaps they ought to go back to aping Bob again; maybe they won’t write the next ‘Frame and Canvas’ but even ‘Movie Music Vol. 2’ would be preferable to this. Even better, just quit the pretense and start doing chiptune. At least then I wouldn’t have to review it.