hearts!attack – If You Were Dead
I’ve made the mistake of over-excitment before, so I tend only to draw tentative conclusions from a release as short as three songs, good or bad. In this case I am helped by a degree of ambivalence towards the last track, which means that although I am really impressed by this band, I feel some inner restraint against getting carried away just yet.
Regular readers of this site will be pretty familiar with this kind of music already: growly indie-pop with slightly off-beat, changeable rhythms and discordant boy-girl harmonies. It’s a style I love, but ultimately the success of this is down to one simple fact: the songs are as infectious as hell, a fact which renders most questions of production values irrelevant.
Does it stick in your head? Yes? Then it’s good.
Does the band have needlessly frivolous punctuation in their name? Yes? Minus points. I really don’t like that; it’s the kind of joke which wears thin really, really quickly.
Now that I’ve got those two bugbears out of my system, let’s continue. These recordings are something of a cluttered, chaotic minefield. In the superb title track and the excellent Mariana hugely infectious tunes break free from the skittering mess around them, emerging to reveal fuzzy, surpising pop gems. Dead Snails, however, struggles a little to accomplish the same feat, in my opinion. It’s as if all the swirling elements of the song never quite achieve resonance and remain something of a choppy pool of music which never quite produces the waves the other two manage. Still, this is all very promising and I am definitely looking forward to finding out where this band go from here.
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kinda garagey/punk, no?
Yeah, I tend to use indie to describe pretty much anything. I hoped the actual description might be more informative because I tend to get into a pickle when I pick genres to stick things into.
No, I certainly know how you feel – I guess I was over-generalizing. But hints of those genres sort of shone through above all else for me. I also really like your description of the tunes as “fuzzy” – oftentimes it’s hard to find the right words but that sums up much of the sound. And here I am, going from way too broad to incredibly shallow.
Ah, music – the wonders of putting it into words.
I’ve never characterised my reaction to music as anything other than shallow.
I’m convinced it’s right, of course, but it’s still usually pretty shallow.