3 out of 5

Label: Waking Records

Produced by: Steve Roche (recorded by)

While, I’d say, technically a more accomplished album than their debut, The Fiction’s followup, Names, compresses some of the group’s more audacious riffage into the briefest of attacks between intense punk riffage and time-change breakdowns.  Initially, this makes ‘Names’ almost sound messy – it’s hard to process how much stuff they’re doing amidst all the noise they’re making – but once you get a feel for it, it’s damned impressive: The Fiction stops and starts on different approaches with precision, while maintaining an overall cohesive affront of shouts, guitar, bass, and drums for any give 3- or 4-minute track.  Unfortunately, this compression removes the kind of raw eagerness that made ‘I Told Her That I Like Living In a Box’ so grabbing.  ‘Names’ is nowhere close to being streamlined or anything, and Steve Roche’s brittle, up-front recording prevents the disc from slipping into background noise, but with all the instrumental interplay not as immediately noticeable, and with the act tightened up, things do start to sound like more typical hardcore punk.  When the album’s midpoint offers up some slower, not-turned-up-to-11 emo riffs, while these end up prefacing great tracks, it’s another notch against a sense of uniqueness, or immediacy.

Here and there, though, the group achieves some relative masterpieces that balance out their newfound focus with the eager fury of the preceding album, such as on ‘Sad Songs Are Nature’s Onions,’ which effectively rattles between the two styles.

The Fiction had a standout, nigh-sloppy sound when they debuted.  Their followup shows sharpening of their skills – and offers some downright pummeling cuts – but often ends up sounding somewhat similar to other acts in the genre.