Imagine yourself as a member of an up-and-coming band, on the brink of releasing a shiny new EP. Full of excitement and optimism, you’d be talking with record company people, talking to your existing fans, talking to everyone you know about the momentous event. You’d have made sure that the meagre five songs you can release would be exciting, interesting and vibrant, so as to wow the reviewers on discerning music websites. You’d do anything but squander the opportunity, right?
Out of the five tracks Swimming have to wow us with here, there are two that begin to push the envelope. One of the songs in question is “Panthalassa”, a propulsive slice of electro-rock sandwiched in between “Pretle Pane” (an instrumental noise-dirge which serves no purpose whatsoever and you will never, ever listen to again) and “There’s A Mountain (Henry & Clare)” which is a barely passable slow-builder which at least has some mildly interesting guitar work going for it.
The opener, “All In Time To The Shoreline” begins with the line “I’d rather die than give in, so that’s what I went and did”, which almost makes me want to follow his example, as does the rest of the track, which is an arduous affair, a thick glutinous electro-smog under which a proper song might be hiding. The second decent track here is “Mirror Maze”, which whilst committing a number of heinous vocoder crimes, does at least pull its finger out and inject the EP with a bit of energy and verve in the same vein as “Panthalassa”.
When it comes down to it, this is a bit of a disappointing effort. Even across a mere five tracks, Swimming fail to keep their momentum and waste precious minutes on pretentious, tiresome electronic plodding which weighs these swimmers down like an anchor. The two rockier tracks show that Swimming are not entirely devoid of talent – when their full-length album emerges, there’s every chance that they could pull something out of the bag – but on the basis of Primary, Swimming might need a few floats for the time being.
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