I know, some of you are questioning why Rob “The Metal Guy” is reviewing a non-hard rock/heavy metal album. I can just imagine a kvlt black metal badass seeing this and calling me a poser from their mom’s basement while eating a Hot Pocket. However, I thinking that it should be know that I listen a variety of different artists and even though this blog is called the Rock and Metal Temple, I am always willing to review and promote artists that I believe people should check out.
For many year I have been a fan of new wave, synth wave and dark wave, anything with "wave" attached to the end, so when the opportunity came upon to review this new release from the band, Low Moments, I thought here is a great opportunity to breakaway from what I usually review. Plus, with an album cover as hilariously clever as, “Picked Dead Last in the Dodgeball Game of Life,” you know that this is an album worth checking out. All the songs on this album actually have pretty amusing titles, but the music is very unique and very diverse. You do hear a lot of catchy synth pop arrangements, as well as some gloomy new wave elements. Also, the songs are rather short in terms of length, which I found refreshing to hear and helped the album flow from start to Finnish without much issue.
What stood out the most was how a song could be extremely catchy and full of brilliant sounds, yet contain some very interesting lyrics. I mean, the song titles alone are sheer genius and capture the type of personality I want from a band looking to experiment with a variety of styles and sounds. “Asthmatic Around Ladies,” is one song that I found to be extremely entertaining and it actually features some really creative sounding bass parts. Being a huge fan of New Order I always like hearing those sharp sounding bass parts to inject some extra moodiness to the overall sound. On the song, “Always Outside the In-Joke,” the music brings you into this very vibrant sounding world, which is also met by the singers very sad and solemn voice.
The album contains a handful of very short instrumental jams, some of which I would definitely like to hear expanded and incorporated into future material. I mean, the synth arrangements and melodies can be extremely addictive sounding at times, but then some of them can sound like samples from a cheesy 80’s TV show about detectives in Miami shooting at drug dealers who are supposed to be from a foreign country yet look like they have fake spray tans and talk with painfully phony accents. One instrumental track that I really enjoyed was, “When Your Song Title Are Better Than Your Songs,” because the title one again highlights into this band’s sarcastic sense of humor. I could even have seen this song with its trippy 80's sounding guitar riff being used as the theme music for a movie that blends together the worlds of John Waters and John Hughes. I would have loved to have seen a Divine meets the Breakfast Club film, or Divine as the lead role in Uncle Buck.
“But No, For Real, I’m Good at Nunchucks,” was one track that all humor aside really caught my attention. Even though the song is not very long you are presented with this rush of creative ideas and the punky sounding riff towards the end provided an extra touch of 80's sounding adrenaline rushing attitude. Low Moments may like to come off as a humorous act at times with their songs titles, but the musicianship is no joke and the quality of the recordings is very impressive for the most part.
Throughout the entire album I cannot say that I was offended, or completely disturbed by anything, so if anyone wanted to hear some classic sounding synth pop music to reminded them of the 80’s instead of that obnoxious Netflix show about Russians, a girl with supernatural powers exactly like Carrie and monsters practically stolen from the first Resident Evil film, then I highly recommend listening to this album. Low Moments is definitely the band to be playing right now as you cruise around in your Delorean drinking your New Coke and making all the young kids in your neighborhood think you are going through a midlife crisis.
Check out the video for "Asthmatic Around Ladies" :
Low Moments :
No comments:
Post a Comment