A link to a press release for a new band it might be better not to name turned up in my Twitter feed.
A band who struck a chord with each other and found a common ground in the love they have for the same music – bands with identities and guitars!
Wow! Guitars! Whatever will they think of next? Will they actually learn to play them?
The guys are armed with a strong identity and craft for song writing. They brim with a confidence not seen since the Britpop days with songs that reach to grab you from the intro and don’t let you go till the last note is viciously struck in a punk vein.
What can I say? With a press release as clichéd as that, can we assume the music is equally formulaic? And it’s the second time you’re used the word “identity” too. Does this perhaps imply an emphasis on style at the expense of content?
Lyrically they offer an insight into the social commentary and satire of contemporary suburban British life, with choruses to get you singing along and po-going the night away to your hearts content.
Let me guess. Songs about fights outside kebab shops on a Friday night. I bet nobody’s done that before…
They put on a captivating live show and are often described as a musical blend of Blur, Bloc Party and Wire. A juggernaut of a sound!
As a metal fan, I have trouble using the word “juggernaut” when it’s abundantly clear by now that we’re talking three-chord indie. Other vehicle descriptors might be more appropriate. How about “moped”?
I did listen to their promo on YouTube. Well, about 45 seconds of it, which was as much as I could stomach. It was every bit as bad as I feared; tedious, tuneless landfill indie-by-numbers. The breathless Nathan Barley style PR guff had inadvertently described it very well, but just not the way the author had intended.
People accuse progressive rock of being a conservative and backward-looking genre, and a lot of it is probably guilty as changed. But in my mind 90s Britpop was a far worse offender with its insular parochialism and extremely limited palette of musical influences. Much of it came over as a pastiche of the same second-division guitar pop that represented the “stagnant musical forms” Steve Hackett famously wanted to get away from back in 1970, combined with a bit of watered-down punk shorn of the visceral energy that was really the whole point of punk.
It was bad enough in the 1990s. Making the same sort of music in 2012 is a pastiche of a pastiche. That ship has not so much already sailed as been consigned to the breaker’s yard.
The news of the disappearance of guitarist Owain Roberts, and the huge and ongoing fan campaign to spread the word and help find him has rather overshadowed the fact that the band have a new record out. Indeed, the band sent out the signed pre-order copies just days before he disappeared.
