Review by: Alex Hannan
When the needle drops on STATIC ME’s debut LP, the vocals make an immediate grab for your attention. Confident and melodic, they bring to mind LA FRACTION or LIFE… BUT HOW TO LIVE IT?, swooping through melodies while matching the band’s grit. Instrumentally, the rest of the band aren’t as technical as the latter group or as hard-charging as the former, occupying a mid-paced middle ground of sturdy power chords, spartan guitar leads and oblique melodies. I’ve seen comparisons to XMAL DEUTSCHLAND and KLEENEX referencing some kind of goth-post-punk, but I’m only getting very slight hints of that flavour, and only really when they take the tempo down (a tactic with mixed results here.) What I’m hearing is mostly 90s post-LEATHERFACE mid-tempo melodic punk, say MANIFESTO JUKEBOX with a hair more WIPERS flavour. The LP fleshes out re-recorded songs from a 2012 demo tape into a fuller release. The lyrics seem to be on interpersonal themes, although the insert is handwritten in a baroque scrawl and very difficult to make sense of.
It’s all well-delivered, but quite controlled. The vocalist tries to enliven the songs with vocal tics and eccentricities here and there, trailing off into gravelly tones in “Knots”, stuttering out strings of “e-e-e”s in “Youth trash”, leaping into cooed bridge vocals in “Static me”. It’s taken a fair while for the songs to sink in and turn around an indifferent first impression, and I still wish STATIC ME had used the twin guitars to more interesting textural effect. Some songs are lacking in memorable riffs, like “Blister”, and in others forward motion seems to be achieved merely by the piling up of riffs, the songwriting not really wresting any compelling progression out of the ideas. “The golden guts” is an example – the two different time signature sections of the song just sit next to each other, seemingly unconnected except by proximity. “Fitting flesh” and “Sober needs” both have misplaced-sounding middle sections or middle eights which interrupt the song’s flow.
The record does take off towards the middle – “Static me” and “Faster” are good tunes. “Safety lines”, sandwiched between them, is the best of the slower songs. Despite my issues with the structuring choices in “Fitting flesh” and “Sober needs”, they have some of the catchiest riffs and best energy of the record, proof that there are plenty of strengths on show here, just not all shaped into a convincing form. Perhaps a 7″ or two would have been a better idea before the full-length? Still, worth a listen and a marker of what could be good things to come