>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Question 1: Do you like these lyrics from Ohio’s Tin Armor?

We’re living a life of abundance
the squalor of rentals aside
We cherish our things and live beyond our means
to the tune of our paychecks demise

We’re living a life of reluctance
the impulse under the influence aside
We hold on to our peace and we stay in our seats
and we haunt each other’s halls all night

Well they say one in hand is better than two beside
and most times it’s hard not to agree
But of my actions left aside
it’s just not alright that there are so many

Question 2: Does your collection of music include some of the following?

Cory Branan, Ben Folds, Drag the River, Drive By Truckers, The Weakerthans, Okkervil River, Armchair Martian, Wilco, Austin Lucas, Lucero.

If the answer to either or both questions is ‘yes’, the odds are good that you will enjoy Life of Abundance.

I’m well aware that this ‘review’ looks, well, pretty fucking lazy. Rest assured that I’ve been dwelling on this one for a while. My problem is that while I dig this record I’ve got nothing in particular to say about it. That’s a bit of a disappointment. The last time I went to an alt-country gig – bear in mind I live in the UK, too – it was an awesome experience. The night’s players mixed and matched and improvised and articipated; it was a thoroughly organic moment full of personality and uniqueness. Cory Branan bought my friends and I some shots. Austin Lucas wandered around through the audience whilst playing songs and made everything feel approximately 40,000% more special. Another friend made 50% of Drag the River play my favourite songs before I arrived at the show. A historical song that made me think and feel in a more powerful way than I recalled from recent memory. It was an event.

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Apparently Philly bands are a thing right now on NFI. There’s no intentional pattern to it, folks, I’m just writing about what I’ve been sent. Still, recently we’ve had reviews of Empire! Empire! and Hightide Hotel, and to the output of that state we can add Luther.

They’re band with not much of a story. This isn’t too their detriment; I’ve just not been able to dig up much info online. One thing that I have been able to find, from one of the two labels which published this record, is the phrase “a natural nervousness”. Kind of an odd phrase, huh? It’s in reference to the music, sure, but slinging a phrase like “natural nervousness” into the mix when you’re writing about a band is suggestive in itself. It suggests that Luther are a band who prefer to let the music take centre stage, to keep the players in the background while what they create speaks for itself.

What it speaks of is a band who are, well, a really pleasant listen. There’s a decent amount of variance here, between songs that strike a relaxed balance between minimalism and midpace as in ‘Siblings’ – vocally focused, highlighting the emotional quality of the vocals, the gentle dexterity of a few simple guitar picks and those subtle ambient touches that flesh out such a song – and more driving numbers such as ‘There’s Always Money’, a track that reminds me unexpectedly of Cattle Drums in that, frankly, the octave chords in the verses are to fucking die for.

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Last week I wrote a little about how bewildered I was to be sent a number of Christian metal albums to review. I suppose I could have simply chosen to not review them, but I’m game for a challenge.

Some challenges, however, are simply too great. And here we are with The Gospel, by Creations. The band hail from Sydney in Australia and their Facebook page includes this as their mission statement:

Creations embody the gloomy day when humanity murdered Christ; when creator laid His life down for creation, paying the ultimate price for our salvation. The picture is vulgar and the message is offensive; repent and believe the Gospel. We will stop at nothing to “…make disciples of all nations”.

Er, strong words indeed. Normally I’m inclined to express admiration when a band firmly and passionately believes in something, but I’m normally talking about a D.I.Y. approach to music or a dedicated tour schedule rather than a call to unify everyone in the world under one religious creed. That shit is just creepy. I noted in last week’s review that even if I didn’t like their music, Sovereign Strength seemed to be open to a diverse and varied set of philosophies and beliefs within a scene. I really don’t get that from Creations.

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The impressively-named Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) have only been reviewed in the briefest of forms here on NFI: they contributed a single song toward a split with Into It. Over It. It wasn’t much to base an opinion on a band around but it was a gentle and melancholic piece of music that I enjoyed well enough.

Home After Three Months Away is a four-track EP from the band, with all four tracks around the two or three minute mark. Opening with ‘The Loneliness Inside Me Is A Place’ – a cringe-worthy title, if I’m on honest – things get off to a bad start; whilst the guitar noodling is quite inventive and playful the chord progressions don’t have much going for them. The song also builds steadily over its length but the effect of this is mitigated by the band’s determination to remain so very mellow.

Fortunately things feel more active when we come to ‘Water’, a comparatively energetic tune thanks to plenty of crashing and trembling cymbals, more charming guitar noodling and some clean palm-mutes in the verses. » Read the rest of this entry «

Just last weekend I published a review of Snowing’s I Could Do Whatever I Wanted If I Wanted and much of what I said about that record could be broadly applied to Hightide Hotel’s Nothing Was Missing Except Me. Both bands, in fact, hail from LeHigh Valley Philadelphia, and odds are good that they’ve shared more than a few stages in their time.

I’ll approach this review a little differently to how I normally might, as I’m actually writing this mere minutes after typing up my thoughts on the Snowing record, and I’m hesitant to repeat myself. If you’ve randomly browsed by, I suggest clicking here to read last weekend’s review. If you’ve already read it and are wavering on whether or not to keep reading this, then I’ll save you some trouble either way: if you dig Snowing, you will probably dig Hightide Hotel as well. Ditto if you like Grown Ups or Castevet or Meet Me In St. Louis, and so on. We cool?

So to start things off, it’s worth noting that Hightide Hotel have a playful and almost ambivalent attitude as their hometown friends: that much is obvious from the title of the first song, ‘I’m Just Sippin’ On Monster, Thinkin’ About Life’. Srs themes makin’ for srs business! The song’s a pacy number, too, although it eschews variety in favour of repeating and looping its licks and riffs at speed, with the rhythm section laying down a fast tempo with lead guitar noodling about over the top of it.

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I’m not entirely sure why Mediaskare Records have sent me so many Christian metal/hardcore records to review. I don’t have a problem with Christian music beyond the segregatory tendencies of parts of that scene, nor a problem with Christianity or religion in general beyond that I disagree with it on a personal and philosophical level. From what I’ve read about Sovereign Strength online they are similarly chilled about differences of opinion, so I like that. But how on Earth am I going to engage with songs called ‘Everlasting Fire’ or ‘Last War’?

It’s not even as if Mediaskare are an exclusively Christian label. But for some reason they sent me four records to review before I announced that I was wrapping up my music reviewing, and three of those four records had obvious Christian themes. The Prophecy isn’t even the most overt. That goes to Creations’ The Gospel - similarly difficult review coming soon!

Anyway, moving past that, The Prophecy kicks things off with ‘Darkest Sin’ and forty seconds of faintly sinister noise before something as heavy as shit kicks in. Seriously, these guys play with everything downtuned to a severe degree, so if you like heavy, dark and loud sounds, then you’ll find something to like here. » Read the rest of this entry «

Dan Webb and the Spiders hail from Boston, and formed in 2009. Since then they’ve wasted little time, recording three full-length records, toured Europe and the US Midwest and East Coast, and shared stages with one of my favourite bands – The Sainte Catherines - alongside other punk rock luminaries such as The Slow Death, Thousandaires, Lemuria and The Dopamines. Much Obliged is their third album.

Biographies! What a fine way to start a review they are.

I’d not heard of these guys before they contacted me with a review request, but I’m damn glad they did: rough-edged but tight melodic punk rock with gruff vocals, sing-along choruses and sweet chord progressions that deliver their payload in under three minutes are pretty much the definition of ‘my thing’.

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I first heard of Snowing when my friend Jay mentioned them at the top of a list of noodly emo/punk-style outfits I should check out; this was back in 2009 when I’d started getting into outfits like Castevet and Grown Ups. Snowing sounded like major movers and shakers in the scene from what he was saying and I dutifully went off and checked them out. Lo and behold, 2009′s Fuck Your Emotional Bullshit was pretty sweet, and the scattered other tunes I picked up on were almost pretty solid.

Still, they didn’t make it into regular rotation. I don’t think there’s any particular reason for this; my music library is full of excellent bands who I listen to alongside a lot of other new material and then are unfortunately forgotten when I move on to the next new crop. That’s an unfortunate side effect of MP3 blogs and, well, music reviewing.

Anyway, by all accounts Snowing do this style of music perfectly – it sounds rough and loose but is clearly tightly played, with the band weaving around one another with easy proficiency. There’s an obvious and strong emotional investment with the music and the lyrics but also a powerful sense of whimsy – from the record’s ridiculous but endearing longcat-aping cover to song titles like ‘Memo Yeah That’s Fine Man’. It is almost a form of irony; a recognition that something about which a person feels so strongly can often be absurd and should be understood as such even while it is treated with respect and some degree of seriousness.

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Oh boy. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to write about a record because you could so easily sum up your thoughts in a single sentence.

That sentence: if you like Dear Landlord, Off With Their Heads, Banner Pilot and The Soviettes then you will also like this.

Dead simple huh? Gateway District features current or ex-members of all of these bands as well as The Salteens and Rivethead (who I’ve not heard) and play awesome fast-paced hooky punk rock music that recalls all four bands in that sentence above, with vocals that recall either The Soviettes and The Epoxies (despite not, as far as I can tell from half-finished Wikipedia pages, actually featuring a female singer from either band). From this side of the pond, Caves are also a good reference point for nailing down those lead vox, with The Vibrators surely being a more classic influence.

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The press release for Philly’s Restorations’ self-titled LP paraphrases reviews of an older EP, stating that the band make music for “grown-up punks”. This is kind of amusing. Firstly, old punks don’t die. They just smell that way. Secondly, punk’s not dead, but Reagan is. Thirdly, “grown-up” is a child’s phrase, surely?

But it is also a pretty fair description, in some ways. Restorations are identifiably emerging from a punk rock tradition, even if their music spreads its wings more broadly than these origins might allow. Perhaps it’s just in the choice of chords, or the guitar tone, or the gruff lead vocals that remind me, somehow, of a wearier, more relaxed Mike Hale from Gunmoll – or perhaps just any No Idea singer with a whiskey & cigarette tone and a love of country*.

Regardless, the eight songs on offer here are restrained, drawn-out, and aim for a very textural approach – by which I mean their strengths are teased out of a song’s whole fabric rather than derived from killer hooks. Still, we’re not straying into full-on post-rock territory; there are instrumental moments but plenty of vocals throughout, and the songs are mostly structured around traditional verse-chorus patterns.

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