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Now
that the whole no guitar pure bass and drums band formula is
going into some sort of toddler-like stage we can assess the
work of bands like this Philadelphia foursome and used other
templates as a point of comparison. Of the most distinctive and
that we could probably tag as a flagship band we got Big
Business (Here Come the Waterworks), whose latest work has taken
a right turn and has improved greatly simply by re-targeting the
songwriting towards a more immediate sound. Northern Liberties’
newest recording is somewhere in the middle, not so far to the
left as to come off as way experimental, nor too right indented
as to come off as formulaic, radio-ready, or to grant the
tagging of ‘fucking sell-out’, it works quite well for a few
tracks, but then it sort of falls and gets rather bland.
It’s obvious
that the main instrument is the bass here, its tone is low
(though not lower than say a Kyuss guitar) and clear but it
carries the weight of the music making the absence of the six
strings quite rightful. There are no riffs here, but notes
moving up and down and side to side and drums playing their
part, quite conservatively I must say, considering this is a
band with no guitars. Brothers Marc and Justin Duerr handle the
drums and voice/percussion here, and is obvious that in some
parts there is an extra layer of skin beating.
The things is
Ghost Mind Electricity comes off strong; “Controlled By
Voices From Beyond” sounds like a more no wave and cro-magnon
Talking Heads, and is followed by “Children of the Unholy
Cross’, another strong cut that is singularly great at crafting
a different take of the standard rock format. The absence of the
guitars is here not an issue; when the track goes hard, fuck who
cares about the fucking guitar? But as we approximate the middle
of the album the songwriting gets lazy, hooks vanish and ideas
of great bands Northern Liberties might evoke are no more. There
is great stuff here, but it just isn’t enough and the
songwriting isn’t even. “Changing” lacks everything, it sounds
incomplete and uninventive. The sad part is the second half
screams for a guitar, which kind of breaks the whole objective
of the structure of the band.
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