23 posts tagged “electronic”

Run Hide Survive - Dyson (Punx Soundcheck Remix) Run Hide Survive 1 comment Tour Dates 04/24/09 Apocalypso @ The Old Queens Head London 04/25/09 Mixed in Sheffield party Sheffield 05/04/09 Fuzz Club BBQ @ Sheffield University Sheffield 05/08/09 Club Pony @ DQ Sheffield 05/22/09 Fabric London 05/29/09 Club Pony Special @ The Harley Sheffield 06/12/09 Club Pony @ DQ Sheffield 06/24/09 Kill the Rhythm @ Nation of Shopkeepers Leeds

They make music in [a] former factory next to Sheffield United where they spend hours listening to Cabaret Voltaire and the first 2 Human League albums. This is all in an effort to invoke Sheffield's rich electronic heritage before realising they prefer Brothers in Arms and think the Human League were better when they were produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis.

I should probably hate The Sound of Animals Fighting. A pretty large percentage of members and former members have been in a lot of bands I frankly can't stand. Over the years, it's featured members of Saosin, Circa Survive, Chiodos, Rx Bandits, and Finch. It's sort of a mainstream scene-core dude supergroup, if you will.

And thankfully, their new album and Epitaph debut, The Ocean and the Sun, is so, so, so much better than that description makes it sound. This album sounds like what their last album, Lover, The Lord Has Left Us, probably should have been. The unnecessarily experimental wank has been washed away, leaving some pretty cool songs behind. Gone are the earsplitting chants (well, technically, more like mixed down to a tolerable level), the unlistenable half-baked experimentation, and all the other things that made the last album so tedious, and the line-up has been trimmed down to match, the most notable absence being that of Chiodos singer, Craig Owens. The line-up of musicians has been pared down to about half what it was, with the bulk of the actual performance being carried by the original four-piece lineup.

So what are we left with? The intro track is someone reading a poem in Farsi in a studio. To be honest, I feared the worst when I heard this. Thankfully, instead of putting the chanting and backing vocals way too high in the mix like they would've done on the last album, all the vocals on the title track are beautifully layered. The whole thing sounds almost like something Thievery Corporation would do. The outro features a kinda cool ambient keyboard/spoken word thing that leads into “I, The Swan.” This track has a really cool slithering guitar backbone to it and a kind of downtempo feel contrasted by busy drumming and children providing little spoken word bits that aren't nearly as cheesy as they could be. The loud/soft dynamics on the second half of the song are used economically enough to sound fresh. “Another Leather Lung” takes its cues from OK Computer-era Radiohead right down to the vocals. It's actually not bad, though, despite being something that's been done a million times before. A little bit of The Cure creeps in here and there, providing a kind of cool contrast that I really dig. And then they tear it all apart like The Blood Brothers might have, adding their own touch by dragging it through the streets a little bit before cutting the rope and riding away. The next track, “Cellophane” is kind of boring until the last couple minutes where it builds up into a feedback'd-up guitar solo. The intro to “The Heraldic Beak of the Manufacturer's Medallion” has a cool glitchy sound with some nice key changes going on. After that, it turns into a pretty standard modern post-hardcore sort of thing. The contrast between the slow vocals and the fast music is kind of cool, though. “Uzbekistan” has a really cool keyboard and drum backbone that gives it kind of a frantic, chaotic feel. Bursts of static, butt rock guitar leads, and odd manipulated vocals round it out into one of the best tracks on the album, although it also kind of sticks out by being so different from most of the rest of it. The outro almost reminds me of A Silver Mt. Zion's first album, with spoken vocals slowly overtaking the music (which is appropriate, because they're obviously fans – the last album even featured a track called “Horses in the Sky”). It seems appropriate the the next song, “Blessings Be Yours Mister V” should be more of a straight-up rock song. And it is, and it's kind of faceless up until about a third of the way through where glitchy, mathy guitars take over, and then the whole thing breaks down and gets weird, eventually stopping altogether to make way for harmonized vocals that introduce an almost dancey section with some glitched out drum machine programming going on. “Ahab” is the only interlude actually listed on the back sleeve (there are two others; the intro track, and one entitled “Lude”), and it's a one-minute chunk of static that leads into the delay and reverb drenched intro to “On the Occasion of Wet Snow,” which features tastefully mixed male and female vocals behind a thick wall of sound. Psychedelic guitar leads reminiscent of Built to Spill give this part a pretty cool feel to it. The guitar leads turn into more of a straight-up post-hardcore thing but without much of the hardcore. This is definitely my favorite track on the album, and a pretty good end to it.

There don't appear to be any tour dates coming up or anything, but more info on these guys and where you can get this album can be found at the band's website, of course:

http://www.thesoundofanimalsfighting.com/