‘Feeding Time’ is the debut long player release from the London based alt rock band WAYTER. I reviewed their second single, ‘Twenty’ earlier on in the year and found it a bit insubstantial, but thankfully here with a variety of tracks, the album, for me, has succeeded where the single didn’t.
Opening with their debut single ‘Cheese Sandwich’ the band aim straight at the jugular, and hit their target really well. What I liked about ‘Cheese Sandwich’ was the stop-start explosiveness of the track. This is done to great effect, a bit like The Pixies did in the late 1980s, with short pauses before complete guitar fury, which is top class. The lyrics here, as elsewhere on the album are slightly echoey and somewhat indistinct (hopefully the album will have a lyric sheet!).
The ten tracks on the album pretty much fall into the category of alt rock, although plenty of the songs will clearly appeal to the grunge element.
The main tracks that stood out for me were the aforementioned ‘Cheese Sandwich’, ‘Pilot Turtle’, which is an excellent slice of guitar rock with heavy use of echo and some distortion, which should appeal to fans across the board, especially those who like The Raveonettes.
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‘Guidleigh’, which comes across as a harder-edged, heavier version of The Strokes, with echo laden drums and a choppy stop/start rhythm, is a driving forceful track. I still can’t make head nor tail of the lyrics, there’s something in there about “We built up fire” and “Oh we can talk out in the sunlight”, but that’s hardly a criticism when the music is this good. ‘Dial’, by contrast, has a psychedelic edge and features the lines: “Save me a place, I’ll get there real soon, fight my way through.”
The album also goes out on a high, with the feedback drenched ‘Bike Crash’, a track that it’s difficult to stay still to, and ‘Lima’, a slowly building track which for the first minute consists of train announcements. This is absolutely brilliant, and show that the band is prepared to take chances, and go one step beyond what most do within this genre. On the strength of this, I believe that they may well come to the fore.
Wayter on MySpace
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