2 out of 5

Produced by: Colin Marston

Label: African Tape

This is a tough sell.

Arty hard rock recorded by Colin Marston – thus highlighting his preference for clean, technical recordings, with a bouncy, clipped low-end – topped with the make or break high school poetics of atonal voiced Charlie Looker, also our composers.

The high school aspect isn’t as bad as it sounds, more just to denote that the stuff the dude sings / says is god damned serious, but the way he blends day to day mundanities and depressions with suddenly perverse imagery or phrasing does result in some interesting concepts.  That’s bot the make or break.  And sure, I know you like your share of off-key singers.  Me too.  I know you have your fond memory of whichever vocalist you initially couldn’t stand bit now love.  Maybe Charlie Looker falls into that category for someone.  But I feel more like his method of vocals – which combines off key with off beat as well, cause why not – is at the very edge of that spectrum, pushing things into more outre territory where your only choice is to appreciate the complete unlikableness of it.

The problem is that this oblong-wheeled singy cart is often leading the musical horse: Charlie’s need to stuff a lot of words into the songs beats the path the instrumentation follows, giving it – the music – no choice but to continually stop and start.  And there’s interesting stuff happening there, for sure, very complex and weird compositions, but you can’t tune out his voice to determine whether or not that music stands on its own.

The b side fares better as Charlie takes slightly more of a backseat to the tunes, and you get a vague sense of how this project could work: dude chooses his words a bit more carefully, lets the tense music communicate the mood.

But that’s not what happened here.