According to their web-site THE UNBELIEVERS are making more enemies than friends with their “anti-music industry slant”. Furthermore “you don’t need a big record label to make great music”, which is undeniably true but unfortunately ‘Standing Naked In Disgrace’ is not great music.
The album displays laudable musical ambition with its adult oriented prog(ish) rock tendencies (that in its all too brief flashes of brilliance recalls The Stone Roses and Shack) but the overall sound and quality of delivery is resolutely flat and soulless. The production is desperately in need of shock therapy to awaken the songs from their dull and lifeless torpor. With hope I wait in anticipation for one of their songs to spring from the traps, but instead everything plods along like a knackered tortoise despite the band’s best intentions to make a ‘big sound’.
But ‘Standing Naked In Disgrace’ is not total crap either. The album sits uncomfortably in that decidedly vague and dithering locale called Average; it offers music that wedges itself firmly at the halfway mark between 1 and 10 and is unlikely to shift from its position unless the band undergoes some radical rethinking. The problem is that I’m not really sure what they want to sound like or what they want to achieve in musical terms. That kind of problem is fine if you are genuinely forging music that is ground-breaking and life-changing but this isn’t.
At the risk of stirring up a hornet’s nest the main problem rests firmly at the feet of Tom Weiss, the band’s songwriter and producer. His songwriting strives for an epic and melodic rock landscape but his musical ambition comes at a price; that price being a laboured song structure that demands a more critical objective eye and some serious pruning to shed the excess. Often songs overstate their melodies and ideas and outstay their welcome by at least half their running time. The near-permanent inclusion of the strummed acoustic guitar (that to these ears sounds flat and off-beat at times) is an irritating distraction. The most unfortunate sufferer is the drummer whose bass drum is often so lost in the mix he may as well have been finger-tapping on a Tupperware lid.
|
The production is too amateurish for music that strives for this amount of melodic complexity. If The Unbelievers were making three-chord two minute psycho-punk heart-chargers then the production values would be more than enough. However, they’re attempting a mature brand of music that really needs a more experienced hand at the controls and a level of sophistication and panache in the delivery that can only come from hard work on the road.
Ultimately The Unbelievers sound like four talented musicians who can play as individuals but do not perform together as a unit. Their album lacks focus and direction but suggests an abundance of ideas that currently lack shape and discipline.
All in all their ambition needs more determined self-service or better still, an experienced and guiding hand from outside of the band to galvanise the talent.
|
