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Karaoke Fish Tank
Ten Foot Nun. Crap name. Slightly-better-than-crap single. Can't decide whether they want to be doing stop-start indie punk or wanky guitar workouts. Singer sounds in dire need of an inhaler. Probably okay live, but fairly irritating on record. 4/10 http://www.myspace.com/tenfootnun
"Jonny Sniper" is the first thing I've heard by Enter Shikari, and I'm sort of hoping-against-hope for something good from them. New rave ear-candy being symbolically destroyed by SHOUTY!!! GUITAR-TRASHING!!! RAGE!!! You know. That sort of thing. Sadly, in practice we just get the same sort of earnest wailing every Linkin Park bandwagon hopeful was doing back in 2001 with a bit of lift-musicky synth in the gaps. V disappointing. 3/10 A. Genuine. Freakshow. Appear. To. Have. Some. Grammar. Issues. Perhaps. They. Are. Hoping. This. Will. Make. Their. Single. Appear. More. Interesting. Sadly. This. Is. Not. The. Cassszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. (Well, they do list Mogwai as an influence - what did you expect?) 1/10 Scrim's "My Revolution" is fairly typical bratty-teen punk-metal with radical-by- numbers lyrics, but it's got a welcome blast of energy behind it, and is less than three minutes long and therefore infinitely preferable to everything else I've heard so far today. B-side "Old School" is more of the same, with added muscle. Won't change your life - but it's snotty, sneery and fun. 7/10 http://www.myspace.com/scrimtastic Answers On Postcards are energetic and infectious, and "Confidence In A Can" has chiming guitars and the sort of breathy boy vocals that sucker me in like candy, and I can almost forget that really, it's just upbeat pub rock. Almost. Nothing wrong with it, per se, but at the end of the day it's exactly like a can of Strongbow - enjoyable at the time, but as soon as it's finished you'll just toss it on the pile and forget it ever existed. 6/10 http://www.myspace.com/answersonpostcards Luckily for Karaoke Fish Tank, they're a little better at records than they are at band names. While sadly not a Kenickie cover, "Spies" sounds exactly as you'd expect it to - taut, spare and laden with noirish paranoia - while "Dead Night" steals vocals from the Molko-Ryder-Prangley School of Glam Tarting and applies them to angular post-punk instead. Closer "East" proves they can do urgency, and it'd be nice to hear them break out of mid-tempo a little more often - but since this is a first demo, perhaps we'll hear great things in future. 7/10 http://www.myspace.com/karaokefishtank
I'm filled with a vague sense of dread upon reading Some Velvet Morning's press release. "Musicianship," vomit, spurious classicism, vomit, they met while testing guitars, eww, VOMIT. And the track itself has nonsensical lyrics and that sort-of-vaguely-familiar sense you hear in every pathetic attempt to grab at the lower reaches of the Top 40. However. It's also got cracked, desperate vocals and big crunchy guitars and an unstoppable drive and the brutish swagger of Oasis back before they went utterly shit. So it's hardly original (but since when did that matter?) and probably counter-revolutionary, but I'd still rather listen to this than a hundred Klaxons. 7/10 http://www.myspace.com/somevelvetmorn Paper Tigers' blurb, on the other hand, promises a band influenced by "car crashes and emotional scars… boy bands and pantomimes." Some hope. "Damaged Goods" is sort of whiny and painfully earnest in the same way as Bono, drunken ex-boyfriends and that nice man who came in to primary school and told you drugs were bad. I'm not entirely sure what the point of the added acoustic version is, unless it's to make poor, unsuspecting listeners like me bang their heads against the wall a couple of hundred times more. 3/10 Jess Trash Get fishy about these reviews on our new message
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