“Fuck this place up!” screams Olly Simmons, and for a second I almost feel the flinging limbs of the sweaty, testosterone-charged melee he’s trying to transport me to. But something’s wrong, and immediately I’m uncomfortably aware of the midday breeze coming through my bedroom window, and my fantasy wafts away like a fart in the wind. What’s snapped me out of it is not only the realization that this isn’t a gig: this isn’t even a rock band.
Using computers instead of proper studios, making music as collages rather than recording real events, using gigabyte upon gigabyte of fizzy digital effects – this is hardly a shocking formula in today’s musical soundscape. But with such an impermeable gloop of bitcrushers, autotuning, delays and all manner of other magic spells puppeteering the butchered audio of Collisions’ debut EP, my question is, can we take their crowd-commander act seriously?
Ok, so maybe I’m scapegoating these guys a bit – they’re hardly the only ones, right? It’s just that with the lines blurring all over the place between metal and drum n’ bass/ dubstep, it’s the metal band-gone-electronic side, with all its inherited rock star posturing, that can ultimately wind up looking silly.
The EP has got some half-decent hooks, and Simmons’ Skindred-style dancehall vocals (as heard on tracks like ‘Fire Fire’) are still a welcome novelty in the world of sledgehammer guitars and headbanging, but the best track for me is the harsh jump-up finale, a remix by Fickle6, simply because it’s the only point I don’t feel like I’m being told porkie pies.
No comments:
Post a Comment