Sparrow & the Workshop – Into the Wild
Once again with bands who are my personal friends I find myself getting the criticisms out of the way early. In this case it is that I have seen pretty much all of these songs performed live, and one or two don’t quite retain that zip in their recorded form. Maybe I just have to accept that recorded music is simply different, and that the messy thrill of a raucous live show, which this band absolutely always deliver, is just nigh on impossible to translate directly into a studio recording. The highs and lows have been smoothed out just a little, I’d say, and might be something worth addressing for a full album.
It doesn’t matter though, because this is still a fucking great EP – one of two they’ve released this year already. Perhaps inevitably for a band whose lead instrument is pretty close to actually being the drums, the rhythms on this are just a bit weird, really insistent, and completely brilliant. Between You’ve Got it All and Into the Wild they really don’t give you much room for breath. And by the time the thumping drums and snarling guitars of the latter come to an end you really do just find yourself thinking ‘fucking hell!’ and wanting to chuckle and toast the band with with a sloppily handled pint. It’s a fucking great start to a record.
They give you a moment to rest with Crossing Hearts, which I must confess has yet to entirely worm its way into my affections, but which is an important change of pace for the sequencing of the record as a whole. It doesn’t last long though; Blame it on Me starts with a thunderous bashing and a snarl of guitar, which is almost immediately replaced by a wail of vocals, before settling down to something a little less fearsome. But fucking hell, point made, they are rocking these days!
I don’t know what it is that they do that feels so different, because in most ways their music is quite familiar. Nevertheless I find it really tricky to pin down. It’s not exactly Americana, but although there’s a lot of punk in it at times it’s still not really punk, and it’s not what I’d call rock ‘n’ roll either. A Horse’s Grin maybe comes back to the more familiar, rolling sound of early Sparrow stuff, but the real message from this EP for me is that Sparrow & the Workshop, having taken a little time to find their feet and settle with their initial sound, have now decided that they are going to come at their audience with all guns blazing.
I have to confess that I found Into the Wild a little disorientating at first, but that’s perhaps no surprise. I always love it when a band can ride out the early flush of excitement generated by their very first songs, and then come back with more really high quality stuff at just the point when so many bands falter and fail to show any real substance. This lot, it appears, really are the business and I cannot wait for their debut album, I really can’t.
Sparrow & the Workshop – Into the Wild
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Yes, it’s Fresh Air time again, and Ruth is back from the bring of death and ready to chatter away once more. This week we have Russell from Mammoeth playing live in session for us. He has an album out on Mini50 Records some time in the relatively near future, so we may try an weasel a preview out of him if we can.
I know it’s the run up to Christmas and the New Year, but there will be no Best of the Decade lists on this blog, no sir. The reason? Well, for fuck’s sake, I’m just far too fucking lazy! Christ almighty, no disrespect to the people who have the energy to do it but I wouldn’t even know where to begin raking back through all the albums released in the last ten years, never mind starting to filter them into some kind of sensible order. Madness!
I often struggle to write about Art Pedro, because I never quite know how to phrase exactly what it is I want to say. Basically, I almost always find myself thinking ‘okay, lots of good stuff going on, not quite sure I’d say it was entirely clicking for me, but I like a lot of the ideas happening here’.
I discovered Beat the Devil, Shilpa Ray’s previous band, through the brilliant 
I’m assuming that this album must be post-something, because stuff that’s kind of difficult to describe is usually called post something or other, although buggered if I know what. It was passed to me by Ruth from the Bowerya month or so ago and I’ve listened to it a lot since then.
