Here we have 13 rather brief tracks of frantic material with a lot of caustic guitar chords and layers of varied screaming vocals with jagged rhythms and quick tempo shifts, occasionally hitting on brief spurts of laidback clean guitars. I'm generally not into this kind of stuff, and I have to confess that the playing here is a little too sloppy for me to really get into (a lot of the guitar parts are panned and independent of one another, so the falters are more evident), but I do find the vocals to be more convincingly sincere than usual, and some of the more tangible chord progressions get slightly heavier and more aggressive, which is nice. I also like that the bass parts are just as wild as the guitars, so there are a few rampant bass runs that fly all over the neck, so even though it's not really my style, they've got some interesting things going on. Also effective is the fact that the songs are really short and all flow together without any blank space (a great touch on this one), so things keep moving rapidly. It's kind of hard to get a feel for the writing because things are so jumbled, but they've got some melody happening in there at times, though it's really the tighter and slightly chunkier picking patterns that always jump out at me (I guess because everything else tends to twist and turn all over with lots of discordant note choices and stuff). "Run" opens with some soft clean guitars and really lets some of the dryer vocals shine through, making for a really nice little song, and coincidentally the similarly titled "Run!" (one of the longest tracks at nearly three minutes) is darker and heavier than the other songs, making for my other favorite of the disc. I don't have any particular quarrels with the production. The bass could be a little louder and the guitar textures a little more honed, but were the playing not so loose and messy (which is partly intentional, no doubt) the recording would be fine. The drums and vocals sound good, and for the most part everything is okay. A little thin at points, but again, reigning in the performances would really help unify a lot of the structures, so... The layout has a mix of simple text, simple line illustrations, and minimal photography, so it's sort of 50/50, but basically looks good, and something about the outer packaging does catch my eye. Inside are the brief lyrics as well as a few pages of super serious text that seems to delve into a wide variety of messages important to the band, things like the importance of communication, class divisions, greed and excess in modern society, and various other socio-political topics. The lyrics cover similar topics as well as delving into sexism, progress vs. destruction, and so on. "Laboring our identity stereotypes like they were raised, With every single fucking clich? imaginable involved, Breath reduction conscription unreality reality..." I'm not won over, but there's enough here for me to respect the effort and listen to it without a real hitch. I'd love to hear them calm down a little more often as well as get their playing in check, but there are some interesting tracks here.
[Waking]
Running time - 26:18, Tracks: 13
[Notable tracks: Run, Run!]
Waking Records - http://www.wakingrecords.com
