April 7, 2007
Two guitars, bass, drums & hoarse rasping vocals from Ohio USA playing straight forward american rock music, Two Cow Garage manage to rack up a couple hundred live shows each year. With a European Tour scheduled for Summer 2007 we’ll not judge whether they had time to think of a more inspired name for their third album so Three it is.
Sticking strongly to the rock n roll cowboy formula with songs about how shit things are when endlessly touring, Three strolls along from one bittersweet regret to the next with the vocals setting a very strained feeling to the whole affair which at times is crushingly depressing. Often Two Cow Garage struggle to convey the ‘who gives a fuck’ attitude that real kick-ass rock music requires to reach into your guts and tighten guitar strings round your soul.
Halfway through though, Now I Know bounces in unexpectedly like a bastardised american version of a Quireboys tune before the album sliding back into Should’ve California, a what could’ve been ballad about youthful glory days. Mediocre then takes us into a Dave Lee Roth self-parodying sound complete with horn section but overall the highlight, upbeat moments are over-shadowed by the world weary balladeering, leaving the album as the perfect soundtrack to anyone wishing to buy in a gallon of Jack Daniel’s & a carton of Marloboro and smoke & drink themselves into oblivion. Understanding that is the key to the album’s greatness.
March 21, 2007
One of The Netherlands’ finest embassadors of pop punk, constantly touring around the UK & rest of the world, you’ll find The Apers being name-checked alongside The Queers & Screeching Weasel by anyone worth their punk-cred salt. Descended directly from the quick-fire two-chord, one-line sing-a-long repeat lines of the Ramones and sticking right to the half-hour album ethos—“you can play the album at full volume with speakers out your window and have it finish before the cops arrive”—don’t expect anything new here. But hey, if it ain’t broke then there’s no need to fix it.
After more than ten years and five albums it’s no surprise that this time around The Apers have offered a somewhat more mature sounding album, very by-the-numbers at times and with a couple of instantly forgettable tracks along the way. They’re gone before you notice though and a new jumping chorus hook is along to keep you entertained.
Reanimate My Heart is one of the album’s epics, reaching almost three minutes fifty seconds. It slows down the pace from the rest of the album’s full frontal punk guitar onslaught, a welcome change from so many of today’s ‘punk’ emo kids idly thrumming away at guitars for no apparent reason. The aim here is clear, get off your dumb fat ass, start shaking it and jump around like a loon.
October 27, 2006
This is great. Francesca Chiara fulfils all my wildest fantasies about female rawk singers as well, a hot blonde goth chick descended from a Venetian noble family singing “VAMPIRES, I want to live like Vampiiiires”, who could resist? Add some basil and a wee drop of balsamic vinegar and this album will feed every rock-opera craving you’ve ever had.
Of course a certain level of brain-switching-off needs to be done as the cheese factor is high throughout. Ballsy, bold & daring; grandiose, gutsy & high-flown; mythological, noble and valourous — there are few synonyms of ‘Epic’ that wouldn’t fit here. This is a gothic rock opera done on a huge scale, sometimes even more over-the-top than Meatloaf. Goth metal rock concept albums aren’t exactly flavour of the month these days though. Shame really.
But if ever Emo wanted a lesson in how to write tragic romance then the grand scale here, especially of Fading Roses (“it’s our last day together”), has none of the self-pitying introspection the kids wallow in, this is balls-out stadium screaming about Tragedy. Where emo-teens induldge in little boys crying about skinned knees and broken hearts, this is a full-grown rock diva singing about REAL PAIN. Still just as ridiculous, but in a much more pleasing fashion for those willing to take the trip.
In fact the whole stadium production and referencing influences such as Iron Maiden, Vangelis & Marilyn Manson almost requires the use of exageratted hyperbole about vagueries rather than analysing the wide vocal dexterity shown throughout; the lovely chugging basslines most evident on My Soul; it would seem petty to highlight the chorus hooks in The Chuaffeur and the beautiful rain soundscape of Dark City. Let’s leave it as a Meatloaf-rivalling rock epic.
I’m a fan, but maybe I am just a little embarrased about it so forgive me.
“Thank you God, Thank you for the darkness”
Mydriasis is an excessive dilation of the pupil due to disease or drugs. Well give me the drugs or the disease rather than listening to another hardcore album. This Berkshire five-piece’s PR blurb manages to feature “visionary melodic hardcore”, “post hardcore with a brain” and “experimental rock with post hardcore sounds” to try and cover every base of what I prefer to label as “banal and unlistenable shite-hardcore”.
The same whiney vocals that mean Radiohead get’s right on my tits at times feature heavily. The clipped & shouty background vocals of cliche-hardcore run throughout the album, unwarranted numerous tempo changes in each song and dragging the tunes out for as long as humanly possibly are also staples. Unfortunately there’s a huge number of potential listeners for this and they’ll hate me. I won’t count that as a loss.
The lack of grabbing my attention means I’m not certain if the spoken word overlays on Shinrah were meant to be humourous or poilitical satire, fifteen minutes in and track three has lost my interest for the rest of the album. I may have wandered off and only paid half attention from there on. The Mannequins provided an inoffensive soundtrack for loading the washing machine until the vocals got excruciatingly screamy. Mirrors and Magnets suited washing the dishes quite well with it’s pots & pans beats. The rest of the album carried me nicely through taking the bin out and doing the hoovering.
There are moments of good sprinkled throughout ‘In Order Of Appearance’ but they are sparse, the almost industrial sections of The Mannequins, the violin intro to Orb, but each time things start to drag on—although perseverance reveals a nice piano outro to Forced To Relate, masquerading under it’s own title of Inner City Fields— long after any interest has gone and the hardcore roots start to show as the mood is ripped apart time and again—maybe that’s the purpose of hardcore music and I just don’t get. I’ve already heard so, so many, completely similar sounding bands to mydriasis the boredom is turning to rage, I pray for the day the genre finally collapses under it’s own weight of repetative self-referencing cliche crapness.
On the plus side the cover art features an etch-a-sketch.
