>>Nostalgia For Infinity

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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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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Cool kids, and uncool kids too, may be familiar with Atlanta’s The Wild. They’ve been kicking around for a few years now, touring pretty hard around the US in the process (“We are five friends having a great time playing music together… We all feel the best when we are traveling together and getting to see old friends, making new ones, jumping off of high things into water, and playing music every night”).

I’m a fan of the donation-based label Quote Unquote Records and first came across The Wild via their site, in the form of their self-titled EP. I freely admit that I don’t remember much of that (it was over two years ago, dudes) but fortunately all is well, because A Collection is – you would never have guessed this, I know – a collection of assorted recorded tracks from the past few years. It includes everything from the self-titled EP, songs for their splits with Pedals on our Pirate Ships and Run, Forever (reviewed here) and a smattering of other tunes from live sets and sessions.

So yeah, previously The Wild had for me always fit snugly into a “cool band, don’t really care” sort of bracket. You know, that sort of perfectly acceptable music that you enjoy while you’re listening to, but it never sticks with you and once the record finishes you never play it again and you forget it exists. Until you come across the band’s name again and go, “oh yeah! That shit was cool. How did it go again?”

So there I was digging this album a lot more than I had any of their previous stuff and thinking “wow! These dudes got really good! This is rad!” And then I learned that it was a collection of stuff going back some years, and then I felt like the idiot I am. It pretty much just goes to show that my opinion should not be trusted, at least until I’ve listened to something half a dozen times or more – which is the case for pretty much all my reviews these days, for what that’s worth.

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Remember a few years back when two-piece rocks outfits were all the rage? Of course you do! We had Blood Red Shoes, No Age, P.S. I Love You, er… Tenacious D. And before that the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and Death From Above 1979 (who loved it so much they had to come back again).

Tenuous intro is tenuous. There’s no real connection to be made here; two-piece bands are nothing new and have been a staple of rock music for… well, for about as long as rock music, probably. It’s just that I don’t have much info about The Atolls beyond that they hail from Glendora, California, and their hometown is probably not named after the Rilo Kiley song.

Okay, check this: they formed sometime kinda recently, I’d guess, as this self-titled and self-released EP is the first and only record listed on their various websites. And these guys have done the band thing before, though I’ve no idea who with: it shows in how deliberate these songs are. There’s a decent bit of variety here: the first tune, ‘Low Tide’, is a four and a half minute indie rock whopper, and light on the indie (man, what an increasingly useless word that is as a descriptor!). The closest comparison I can come up with is that this fairly bass-heavy and dirge-like song has a little bit of a the National vibe to it. It’s a bit miserabilist (“People drown in less than a foot of water”) but has some lush and mournful singing over it, with delicately picked notes making their way carefully through the choruses.

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