Album Review: Servers – Leave With Us

In an age when an embattled music industry has sucked up hit after hit, record labels and their artists have found solace in the art of advertising. A brash band t-shirt, a solid tour slot, an enticing line of blurb, one fanatical album review in the right place and a strong social media presence. Any of these things can be the making or breaking of a band these days. With that in mind, you’d honestly believe that the UK trio Servers were rank amateurs. An instantly-forgettable and distinctly internet-unfriendly moniker, a face-concealing “promotional” snap and music video and a few lines of biographical waffle about cults – that’s pretty much it. It’s certainly a back-door approach to self-promotion.


Take a closer look though, because lurking back there in the shadows is an absolute behemoth spouting musical ear-worms that boast grit, melody and muscle. Some groups may mesh a couple of genres together to create something fresh and dynamic – Servers are an octopic rock band with a groping arm in every pie. They are the very definition of the band you simply cannot pigeonhole. Song by song, their chameleonic music takes in grunge, dark rock, screamo, sludge, cult metal, new wave, industrial and punk n’ roll – there are even a few 70s prog touches here and there.

The keystone here is vocalist/guitarist and former GU Medicine frontman Lee Storrar. His “all is lost” melancholics and soaring Jaz Coleman-esque (Killing Joke) throat-ripping wails lock themselves seamlessly onto his portly chugs and wild riffs, but there is solid support from Ant Nettleship’s pounding drums and Lee Wilde’s fizzing bass. This here is a debut album loaded with viperous intent, an intoxicating dark quality and shedloads of melodramatic attack.

Opening with bleak menace, ‘Save Me From Myself‘ is two-parts Cancer Bats and one-part Five Finger Death Punch. It burns with an intense heat and Storrar’s hoarse yelping rises to a scream with the crecendoing chorus whilst the pistoning rhythm rumbles beneath like a detached and hopelessly lost soul. ‘Universes & Supernovas‘ and ‘Run With The Foxes‘ are their two epic firecrackers with vast riffs that will suck you in. Both Foo Fighters-esque in construction and tone, they feature big, sparkly choruses that will aggressively weld themselves to your brain. Wedged between them the intensely gothic, Icicle Works-friendly comedown of ‘Claustrophobia‘ is utterly thrilling and it’s tonal brother, the dark, sultry creature that is ‘King Things‘, is a pulsating beauty with a powerful “breathe in, breathe out” suckerpunch.

‘Mega High‘ ups the ante as Lee Wilde’s fat bass strings combine with Storrar’s buzzing, sludge-flinging guitar to take them powering into Orange Goblin and Fu Manchu territory. This gives licence for the vocal to dial up the snarl and caterwauling as the shit-kicking rock licks come out to play. The joy of the stomp is used to great effect for the raging bluster of the QOTSA-esque ‘Do Gooders‘. Here, their bleak cult ethos that they seem to thrive on adds another more sinister tone to their appeal.

Layered deep enough to give it a potent attack, the strong production also slaps on a slick finish and yet it’s been handled lightly enough to give it real character. Listen closely enough and beneath the power and precision, there is still the odd pop and crackle that bursts forth. No matter which track you shuffle to, there is a resplendent joy prevalent in the construction and an undeniable swagger in the delivery. Here is an album that you sense is alive and breathing. It’s dark purpose may be there in the background but, thankfully, it has not been consumed by it. Rather it stands silently within the crowd, yet with arms open, ready to wrap you in its warm, loving embrace.

When the songwriting is of this kind of quality, there really is no need to go through the standard ritual of self-promotion. If the South Yorkshire trio continue along this path, focusing solely on the creation of the music alone, the rest will simply take care of itself. As their final track clearly points out with its (rather tacked on) spooky soundbite from the “Heaven’s Gate Cult Recruitment Tape” – “The only chance you have to survive is to leave with us”. One listen to this album and you will surely want to follow Servers to the ends of the Earth.

Also online @ Heavy Blog Is Heavy = http://www.heavyblogisheavy.com/2014/01/24/servers-leave-with-us/

Album Review: Dinosaur Pile-Up – Nature Nurture

Even before you hear their music, it’s very easy to find yourself predisposed to love Dinosaur Pile-Up. Just look at their cute moniker – it’s bursting with imagination, full of potent suggestion and ripe with happy childhood memories of playing out fight scenes with plastic tyrannosaurs and stegosauri. Now glance over at that album cover of a chap falling flat on his face – how can they go wrong with such bare-faced self-mockery? Of course, that’s a rhetorical question – you’re better off asking a politician about self-mockery if you actually want a serious answer.

DPU clearly do understand the concept of experimentation, as over the course of their first two albums they’ve set about dumping the twee-ness that made their EP so discardable. Now sporting beefed up electric guitars and with plenty of throbbing bass thunder inserted whereever they can find space for it, they’ve cultured a grungier rock vibe that has placed them firmly back in time, mimicking bands that are either now defunct or have moved away from their original sounds.

So, where exactly do they intend to fit in? Certainly, by starting and ending with a bang, bookending Nature Nurture with their best material, they give themselves a chance here. Opener ‘Arizona Waiting’ is ripe with blasting bottom-end, a lush wedge of Weezer-esque harmonics and a bitter Deftones-esque minor drop, whilst closer ‘Nature Nurture’ burns with a precise, spacious and single-minded two-key chorus. When something this simple forms the album highlight, there’s surely something awry.

The trouble with the running order here is that they spend every track in between carefully placing their feet on paths well-worn by their heroes. ‘Draw A Line and ‘Derail’ rockgasm over a spot of Foo Fighters riff-and-chug teasing, whilst ‘Summer Gurl’, ‘Start Again’, with it’s fluorescent electro riff, and the delicate touches within ‘The Way We Come’ are bruised with Feeder and Ash colourings. Really dig around and you’ll hear the rip-chords and quicker time signature of early-Nirvana in ‘Heather’ and the warm tones of the long-forgotten Arlo glistening through both ‘Peninsula’ and the gorgeous cruise tune ‘White T-Shirt and Jeans’.

Tried and trusted methods are employed like the split quiet-loud verses and the short pause before the happyslap of the chorus hits. Essentially, it’s paint-by-numbers songwriting, which is fine if you’re filling holes, but a little more innovation would go a long way.

So, where do they go from here? Well, settling on a signature sound would be a start, be that through greater employment of their enigmatic, tone-changing minor chords or, perhaps, aiming to unsettle the listener with odd, possibly even angry, passages that demand self-introspection upon the listener. Dinosaur Pile-Up remain as lovable as ever but, oddly, considering their position, they appear determined to remain unambitious and, therefore, are in danger of becoming irrelevant. So, whilst the Foo Fighters have chosen to evolve and the more elegiac Feeder still get away with shifting thousands of units a week, on this form, Dinosaur Pile-Up seem destined to remain the poor man’s alternative.

Also online @ TLOBF = http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/dinosaur-pile-up-nature-nurture-127056

Album Review: Foo Fighters - In Your Honour

Two discs – one loud, one not so loud. As the blurb reads. In truth this is quite a premise… one full-on rock, one acoustic (with special guests). 21 songs for £12! My bargain chip is tingling…

Now before we start, remember I’m a Foo fan. So after a couple of listens all the way through you’ll be surprised when I tell you that this isn’t them at their best – IMHO.

I listened to the Acoustic CD before tackling the Rock CD so keen was I to get it out the box and onto my player. This may have been a mistake. Because what hits you about the Acoustic CD is the sheer strangeness of it all. Once you get over that you realise that what you’re listening to is the Foos sliced from head to toe, split asunder, and there’s plenty of spillage.

Tracks 1-7 come fast and are simply couplets of chords which as background music sound monotonous when stuck together. The best of these are Still – featuring a haunting background throb undercut by half-spoken vocal, Over & Out – with it’s Clapton-esque guitar verse and crisp and sweetly sung vocal harmony, and On The Mend – a sweeping balletic wash of keyboard with double-bass and unusual chord arrangements, with jarring (in a good way) sevenths, which despite being almost spoiled by an unforgivable fade-out is still the CD’s shining glory.

Then we come to Virginia Moon featuring piano and vocals by Norah Jones (in a duet with Grohl). The whole track has a bossanova rhythm and it caught me so unawares I laughed out loud. It’s on another planet to what we know the Foos to be. Next up, Cold Day In The Sun starring the hobo-vocals of drummer Taylor Hawkins. Funnily enough its rock country vibe is kind of what I expected a lot of the disc to sound like. Last track here is Razor featuring what I swear is a slack guitar (played by Josh Homme of QOTSA) over Grohl’s voice laid bare.

One other track that demands extra attention is the sharp acoustic guitar of "Friend Of A Friend". It's the first song Dave ever wrote, in 1991, and is reminiscent of Nirvana’s "Polly". It features the strangely beautiful lines "It was his friend’s guitar that he played / When he plays no-one speaks". I hate myself for even mentioning this – but I had visions of Kurt as the words came out.

All in all, it’s quite a departure for the FF boys and I was amazed at how through all ten tracks they never pulled one out of the bag that managed to surpass the incredible "Doll" from The Colour And The Shape album.

Onto the Rock CD and here we find the Foo Fighters producing more of what we know and love them for. It plays almost like a "Best Of" with a lot of strangely familiar sounding tracks. Elements of all first four albums here, particularly There Is Nothing Left To Lose – check out The Last Song and tell me that’s not "Breakout".

We start out with some tub-thumping and screamo vocals on In Your Honour (that’s honour with a "u" …gasp…) and move quickly onto the 80’s soft rock of No Way Back and straight into Best Of You – a track with an incredible heartfelt verse and such a disappointingly mind-numbing chorus. And then we find DOA – a track that is so much the Foo Fighters of old as to define them. Solid, punchy, roaring rock.

The rest of the disc didn’t raise so much as an eyebrow. It’s all there. There’s no track that stands out and screams "love me" as much as there’s no track that you can turn your nose up in disgust at. If you want those kind of tracks then stick in the Acoustic Disc again – I’ll certainly be playing that one a whole lot more.

It’s almost as if the boys wrote the Rock Disc, got bored, and then thought "let’s try something else". It’s genius, it’s inspired, it’s missing something, and yet it’s certainly worth an ASDA-bottom slap. It’s certainly unexpected. It’s left me feeling slightly hollow. I need to go and listen to this album again – and then again – and then some more.