This North Carolina band has ex-members of Astrid Oto and Pink Collar Jobs (two bands that I've never heard before) and proclaims that "punk rock is folk music" (a concept that sort of makes me cringe), but they're not bad. It's melodic, raw punk rock with male/female vocals (singing, shouting, yelling, screaming, all of it) that definitely reminds me a little bit of that whole east bay punk sort of sound like early Grimple or Operation Ivy (with no damn ska, thankfully) in its energetic delivery. Only one song runs more than three minutes, and the tempos tend to drive the material along very well. One thing that does bug me is that I wish they didn't double the male and female vocals at the same time so frequently, because both singers have solid and individual voices that don't have room to breathe on their own since they're always singing the same lines in contrasting styles over top of one another. I get used to it after awhile, but I'd like to hear them tradeoff a bit more. "Shovel Fight" is much more jagged and abrasive than most of the other tracks, sticking out pretty drastically in the middle of the CD, and "Lemmy Rides a BMX" is appropriately a bit harder edged with more of an attitude, which rules. The sound is a little bit muddy, but the mix is thick and fairly even, and you can hear all of the instruments, so I'm not particularly annoyed by it at all. It works for their style of music, for sure. The layout's not bad. There are lots of illustrations of skeletons riding bikes over cars and what have you, and tiny photos are collaged in amongst both handwritten and typed text, which looks really nice. The lyrics are a mixed bag, some humorous, some personal, some commenting on certain socio-political types of ills, others mixing and matching from all three approaches, etc. But they have a song called "Lemmy Rides a BMX", so that's all you really need to know. This isn't exactly my thing, not so much because of the music, which I enjoy, but because of the atmosphere surrounding the music. I can appreciate where they're coming from, and I can see that they're having fun and conveying a message, I'm just rarely into "fun" music or things of that nature. I don't know why. I guess it's my pessimistic nature. But this is definitely good for what it is. I'd love to hear more songs in the vein of the infectious "Killing in 3rd Person".
[Slave]
Running time - 30:46, Tracks: 15
[Notable tracks: Boone, NC, Lemmy Rides a BMX, Killing in 3rd Person]
Slave - http://www.slavemagazine.com
