The trend towards new bands making low quality, garage pop albums over the past year has been a glorious antidote the pomposity that still haunts mainstream music. U2’s Bono spends half his time trying to fight world poverty and the rest of it prancing about on one of his band’s three £15 million stage structures, whilst relatively small bands such as Muse continue to make albums so ridiculously overblown that it almost makes you glad that JJ72 never got the chance to make it so far. Following on from several incredibly promising 7” releases, Brilliant Colors are the latest group to join this particular counter culture.
With Introducing, the band mark their territory with alarming brevity, with the ten tracks clocking in at an impressively low twenty-two and a half minutes, the San Franciscans aren’t ones to overstay their welcome. It’s probably mere coincidence that the finest moment comes from the longest track, ‘Should I tell you?’. Drowning in a heady mixture of fuzz and 60’s inspired vocals, it’s brilliant, carefree and immediately deserving of your attention. Unfortunately, the rest of the record fails to do so with any regularity.
This is not a bad album – in fact, far from it. A band that has had a vinyl pressed by Woodsist and had their debut put out by Slumberland could never fail to be great. However, it’s worrying that a lot o the band’s early promise seems to have gone to waste on this LP, with the group lacking variation in some parts. Though opener ‘I Searched’ is a solid track, it gets lost within itself, on the band’s noise aspect of their sound rather than the pop that got them such positive early press. The rest of the album follows down a similar path. A lot of the album sounds so alike that it’s almost pointless to try differentiating them. ‘English Cities’, ‘You say what you want’ and ‘Over There’ could easily all be alternate versions of the same song – a good song, but the repetition is a theme that crops up too ignore.
As a whole, this album wears it’s influences like a badge, and The Slits legacy is, thankfully, still burning brightly. However, the shadow of Vivian Girls looms largest over Introducing. The fact that both are female trios making punk inspired low fidelity pop means that comparisons are almost unavoidable. Where the New Yorkers have breathtaking variety and craft, Brilliant Colors debut seems content with bombarding the listener with sound. As anyone who heard their earlier releases will testify, this is a band that can do so much more than that. A huge amount of potential, not quite fulfilled yet.
Buy the album on Amazon | [itunes link="http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/i-searched/id333809648?uo=4" title="Brilliant_Colors-Introducing_(Album)" text="iTunes"]
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I agree that bands like U2 and Muse are over blown crap, but this kind of thing is no better. Although it’s at a different end of the spectrum, it’s just as BORING. It’s right up there with all the “indie” hippy neo folk crap that’s going around like a pandemic flu in music; which is a plague of banality in the extreme. Not that I have anything against folk when it is done well and given an innovative twist, but none of the gen y indie hippies have given it that. -I digress. Back in the 90s I wouldn’t have thought Slumberland would have bothered putting something like this out, but seeing as how they’ve become a parody of themselves, I’m not surprised.