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"The antidote to music made for people
who hate music."
Joe Aybak raids the reviews box… The Twilight Sad- Forget The Night Ahead. The Twilight Sad do exactly what an Irvine welsh novel does to your synapses. But also to your imagination. The Twilight Sad have an overwhelming kitchen-sink drama element to them; with song names like "Floorboards Under The Bed", "Reflection Of The Television" and "The Neighbours Can't Breath", the songs flourish like wonderful stories of modern alienation and suburbia - sounding like a Scottish Nick Cave swooning over simplified songs from "OK Computer". Singer James Graham soothes the apocalyptic ballads with a soft Scottish croon, which with their atmospheric intensity bend Coldplay backwards; crippling their starchy pop like beer-soaked pork-scratchings.
"Forget The Night Ahead" delivers quite a robotic interpretation of modern detached-love, which make for troubled poetic verses that swoon with the claustrophobic music. Lines like "you are a bearer of a womb without love" is such a blunt yet mysterious line for the hook, that vocalist James Graham almost comes over as the Scottish town-crier version of Pablo Neruda. This album is certainly addictive in its colossal anthems and seductive in its failed-glory. The Twilight Sad have produced an album of slouched ethereal anthems,
cock-headed and limp in the downbeat style yet also in a strange way-
uplifting. Alphabeat exfoliate the flesh of a "3-beat drum-machine"
but the lack-of-life in the song block the wide pores like a thick wood-glue.
The lyrics are a gash in the single - "You put a spell on me, I
don't know what to do" Brand New - Daisy
Taking on an edgier, muscular sound like a soul-singing Canadian Bear, Brand New have knocked up a set of songs which could come clean of any petty genre-definition and resonate like Bon Iver songs - played electrically but with a thick southern rock build. Grandiose and wonderful. Standout tracks are Bed, Gasoline and Noro. AFI- Crash Love Another band for the Emo-landfill site, release an album of songs that are more emotive in a frail way, largely due to the weak quality of the music, but still maintaining the lip-gloss polished emotive sound that graced their platinum selling albums. "Crash Love" is a truly-mediocre effort taking the many predictable twists and turns in the song structures, so boringly obvious that it doesn't take much to guess where the songs are going as they "de"-progress. Emo was such a smug-apathetic waste of a genre that the outdated sound of AFI cracks the smooth surfaces in the songs that attempt to get somewhere like the terrible single 'Medicate'. The most prominent track is probably opener " Torch Song" which sounds more like homage to 'Sisters Of Mercy', lacking of course the underlying substance and coming off like slutty wrapping-paper. Dressing the ears with garbage. 4/10 The Drums- "Summertime!" It's oh so hard not to love this band- and if your love is not immediate, these playful pop-songs are guaranteed to worm their way through to you at some point. The Drums play 50's surf-rock with an 80's 'Cure' feel. Ducking and diving out of some of the catchiest choruses with fuzzy guitar melodies plonking along like hysteria canned in a box. Each song is infectious in its energetic video-game pop, and every chorus borrows a hook from each decade of pop, but slamming the melody against a woozy sun-lit backdrop.
"Down By The Water" pulsates with cute-beach boy-love-laden pop heaven like Joy Division paying homage to Cindy Lauper ballads. There is an overbearing childish quality to the sound, but the sounds of the instruments counter this making the combination perfect. 9/10 TeenagersInTokyo- Isabella/Long Walk Home Lets face it, 'TeenagersInTokyo' are incredibly temporary. But in a good way, like a Big Mac; tasty while it lasts but instantly forgettable. Cynicism aside, TIT (well done, the first letters spell out tit) wield their gloomy axes like pop-stars of another generation, with skill and poise. And "Isabella" drifts along in a starry haze- prancing forth with dainty steps like a witchcraft 'Swan Lake'. B-side 'Long Walk Home' however enters with an oh so familiar "yesterday I…." (done in the same way at the start "better than heaven" as Robert Smith of the Cure.) 6/10 The All-American Rejects- The Wind Blows The song in short: a Nintendo-tinged ballad for the robots with big tear ducts. 0/10 Jumping into the gush of lovely shoegazers, Gliss salivate skyscraper sounds on a track which tramples heavily over Big Pinks "History Of Love" like a luminous giant plucked from Lewis Carol's brain. The Brit-pop pulse and Psychedelic energy to this quaint single stomps tremors into the new wave of 'shoegaze' sounding , but the song itself lacks much bite, with a rather repetitive structure. Gliss are the mini Brit-pop 'Ride', with a dazed-pop sound that's catchy but also quite forgettable. 6/10 Thumpermonkey Lives!- We Bake Our Bread Beneath Her Holy Fire Probably one of the best and also most stupid sentences ever written
in a Press release:
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