I started listening to this album on Monday morning when the sun was out in Wellington and it was the day after the first legitimate snow fall in forever. Since then we've had two days of snow so to say this album has been listened to in completely different conditions before this review are pretty spot on. This is Ganglians 2nd albums and the indie pop band from Sacramento have certainly bought out a big album in terms of content.
As said its a big album, 55 minutes long isn't what I'd call the average length of an indie album but thats because you don't have too many 4-6 minute tracks on the albums, while on this over half are at that mark. When listening to this the firsxt time in the sun it seemed quite appropriate it, the guitars glowed through and influence from surf rock were apparent almost immediately. Another aspect I noticed was the lo fi intro to the first track Call Me which helped to make their intentions clear early on.
The track Sleep pushes away from surf rock and into a more synth pop/electro pop idea with a punk edge, the chorus really shows some attitude while the keyboard gives it a sweet and fuzzy appeal. As the album goes on after this you gett he idea that this band has a lot of different ideas and sounds they want to incorporate. This might be why the album is just under an hour because we get a surf rock start, then fuzzy pop, electro pop, electronic pop, synth pop and punk even. This might be cool that all these are incorporated but I kind of find that all the ideas are just thrown on the page and apart from the surf indie rock stuff is refined as it begins the album and gets two or three tracks in a row.
The rest of this stuff is almost designed to be filler but its really the only stuff I really enjoy, the track already mentioned Sleep is definitely great while my personal favourite on this thing is The Toad which is just a really cool psychedelic song, probably the most well made track on the album. The vocals are powerful and in front of some cool while the crunching guitars give the song some attitude.
Overall theres probably a song for everyone on this, but I'm not so sure theres an album here at all if you like an album to explore different genres song by song this might be your thing. I don't mind a band having a bunch of different ideas from different styles but atleast try tie it together. Bunch of cool songs, just not a great album of songs.
Overall Rating: 6/10
No comments:
Post a Comment