Review Summary: The chaos of The Mars Volta, the hook of Rush or The Cure, this album really just kicks you in your pants.
Influences. This album is full of them.
You could even say that it is stuffed to the gills with different musical pressures like: The Mars Volta, The Cure, Rush etc. as the LP is like a quilt of progressive sounds. When I first saw this album on the GSL website I was compelled to log onto iTunes and start listening to it. It really sounds like nothing I have heard of. They start with a burst of synthesizer and guitar screaming out of your speakers and then you hear the perfect fitting vocals of Mire Molnar slowly build up to the wail that really shakes you.
As the album progresses it shows that they are huge Tremulant junkies. Radio Vago almost gives a tribute to Jeremy Ward by giving so much sound manipulation it can make you expect that these guys are working on a new album, sadly they are not. They performed their last concert last year in August. The first 3 songs are very Rush / The Mars Volta influenced and then you come across Dandelion and you really could almost think it’s a new The Cure single. Although I would have loved to see more of that in the song by the last minute they start morphing back into a more chaotic and bouncy playing style.
I would like to say that I found this right when it came out and was hooked ever since, I haven’t bought any of their other albums and do not plan to for a while. This album is amazing but it doesn’t make me want to check their other stuff out. They do show that a lot of their stuff is supposed to be catchy and bubbly but that is good for this album but wasn’t for a band that doesn’t want to go mainstream.
The chaos parts in their songs do not reflect how the style is meant to be played. If you listen to Amputechture or Tera Melos or A Manual Dexterity Vol. 1 you will see how you have to add more than the basic instruments to make the song really thrash out at the mind with psychedelia and texture. The depth of their songs aren’t as much as you would want.
Bottom line: If you want an album that you can listen to that will really pick you up, throw you out of a slum and get you back into a happy mood, this album is it. It can really be used to pump you up, its fast, bubbly, different and very good. All the songs on it are very well done.
