Albums
I've liked Everclear ever since they did 'Local God' on the Romeo and Juliet Soundtrack. It's still by far their greatest moment, and since then they've been a bit hit and miss. This trend continues with their latest offering Songs from an American Movie Vol. 2' and whatever crap makes up the rest of this absurdly long title. They claim they're trying something different here but I think that deep down they know that that isn't entirely true with many moments where they return to all their favourite old chords and start whingeing on about their neglectful fathers again. It's at times like this when I wondered if I'd picked up the wrong album by mistake. ...
Music: Singles
Suddenly it's possible to find merit in Hear'Say. After all, they can at least hold notes - which is more than can be said for My Vitriol singer Som Wardner. With complete disregard for the admittedly lumpen mess of background sound, Wardner alternately grunts incomprehensibly and yelps histrionically in a vain attempt to emulate Kurt Cobain; instead, he proves that he is in fact the bastard offspring of Heather Small and Fred Durst. The distinctly amateur, utterly pointless 'Grounded' lacks any form of musical cohesion, any trace of originality (frankly, it's a 63rd-rate Foo Fighters b-side) and - come to that - a tune. And that's before they proceed to strip Madonna's 'Oh Father' of all beauty and meaning in a distressingly unlistenable abandonment of basic musical principles. If art is humanity, My Vitriol's crimes against the former merit the harshest sentence possible. Execution by firing squad would be preferable....
Music: Post-Post Rock
Some people have it all: A band who get tipped for the top by all the right people, who release extremely limited edition singles on Fierce Panda before being given the money to set up their own record label, who get to tour with bands such as Broadcast, who write for proper magazines like Mojo in their spare time. And just when you think things could not get any more sickening, the youngest member Mia explains the surprise major hindrance to the band's path to world domination: "We're going to have to slow things down a bit. The day the album comes out is the day of my Photography A-Level exam, so we can't do loads of gigs at the moment."...