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: One-Way Mirror – Destructive By Nature

Hands up who likes cheese. We all like cheese, right? We have our favorites too, possibly a mature Cheddar, a gooey Brie, some holey Emmenthal or a few slices of burger-lovin’, good-old processed American. The stuff is so moreish it deserves its own food group.

When it comes to music though, if it’s cheesy there’s plenty of folks are gonna turn their noses up and walk away. Perhaps, it’s their die-hardened old school, true or cvlt moralistic standpoints, perhaps it’s the fact that cheesy music tends to come with a whole charade of gimmicks that puts them off (e.g.; bands that wear coordinated outfits or those that sell weird, often vaguely pornographic, merch), or perhaps they’ve been burned in the past by former musical loves turning bad on them. They may even have had a sense of humor bypass. Me, I love cheese and think it’s almost essential to have a couple of cheesy bands in your collection. Hell, stick on some lounge or some nu-metal and you’ll find me swinging from the nearest obscenely-ornate chandelier.

This, naturally, brings me to the enigma that is those crazy Frenchmen One-Way Mirror. Having previously reviewed the band’s eponymous debut, I thought I knew what was coming with their latest effort, but was a little shocked all the same. With Destructive By Nature, there’s still plenty of cheese on show here – even that sumptuous artwork looks like squeezy-cheese. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of the stuff; a pastiche of yellows, off-whites and blues; a cloud of faint aromas that suddenly burst into noxious whiffs. It’s heavier than before and they’ve most certainly expanded their overt range of production and post-production techniques. The whole focus here is on the incredible diversity of vocal styles booting you regularly in the ears ranging from single, double and treble-layered vocal, gang and crowd chants, obscured sections, electronically-tweaked gargles, fuzzed bits, bass-boosted parts, grunts, screams, cleans and scratched on/off versions. Trust me, if you had a one-way mirror you’d want to have it in their studio, so you could, without hurting the bands feelings, pull the kind of incredulous faces you will be pulling when you hear this. It’s along the lines of Figure Of Six getting chewed on by Threat Signal for doing a Mnemic impression.

Take the opening few bars of the album as an example. Put simply, they use it to introduce themselves. Literally. The kick-drum pads out the timing… “One!” (crowd roar) “Way!” (crowd roar) “Mirr-or!” (crowd roar). Cue big electronic sample and in bursts Rouxel’s full drumkit. Cheesier than a ball of edam. Oh, and they’ve got a press release to match – “This album is not unlike shrapnel as it will embed itself in your system upon explosion. Some songs will make the fans bang their heads while others will simply decimate them altogether”. A wonderfully ludicrous claim and, I’m sorry, but I beg to differ.

This all feels like a bit of a step backwards. I kept listening for the addictive qualities that tracks like “Destination Device”, “As You Are Now”, “Empty Spaces” or “Sockracer”, from their debut, had in spades. That “stand up and pump your fist” hook or the “sing your heart out” anthemic lyrics to kick in, but I kept coming up with shoulders shrugged and bottom lip protruding. The groove through tracks like “Face To Face” and “Straight Into The Wall” have a sinister underbelly but there’s just no firey contents inside whilst the stinging bitchslaps of “Soupracer” and “Deadly Shores” is all fire and no subtlety. It’s almost like, by creating reverberating highly-strung walls that dive into charred chugs and by boosting Perdicaro’s rumbling bass-drive, they’ve lost the ability to punch out kick-ass lines to go with it. The verses are virtually obliterated by theatrical posturing and there’s no simple-structured switch up from there, meaning that the choruses come and go without sticking in your noggin.

They do have a bit of a crack at mixing it up. The uber-heavy thrash that blisters the surface of “Wasted Years” is a welcome addition, there’s a memorably pained howl in the verse of “Inner Symphony” and there’s a couple of sweet soaring choruses in “Unexpected” and “Made In Vain”, where their softer side comes through. Sadly though there’s just too much overlap and too much filler here. It’s a shame as they suckered me in with their yummy debut, where the contrast between rough and smooth, hook and drive, was pretty much bang on. If you’re new to OWM then, remember, the whole thing takes some getting used to (and this certainly improves with age) but if there’s nothing that grabs you on that first spin, it’s unlikely you’ll return for another nibble.

Also online @ The NewReview =  http://thenewreview.net/reviews/one-way-mirror-destructive-by-nature