Saturday, March 14, 2009

Reviews - 3/14/09

Cheetah Speed

Cheetah Speed - 4 Song Demo - The singer on this here sampler sounds a lot like Rick Sims of Didgits/Gaza Strippers fame. Problem is, Rick Sims has always rubbed my ears the wrong way. There's some pretty solid deep-space trucker, somewhat-psychedelic hard rock going on here. Lot's of lyrical references to nature, space, maybe even rainbows? I don't know...I gave this one a few listens, but it just wasn't grabbing me. These guys can definitely play, but the songs themselves are a little boring. The Cheetah Speed seems to be on to something by song 3 of this 4-song demo as they get a little darker and edge away from boasting about how much they rock, but it was a little too little and a little too late.

This review is making it sound like I hated this, and I didn't. Just wasn't too crazy about it, that's all. It looks like this band has broken up since we first got this demo anyway so whatever. (www.myspace.com/thecheetahspeed.com)

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Mature Addiction - To the Death of a Day - If a band takes the time and effort to record something, put artwork together and spend postage money on sending it out for people to hear and review, the least we can do is listen to the whole thing. It's only right and it's the honorable thing to do. That being said, we here at Beercan were very hard-pressed to make it through this one. This was 14 tracks of acoustic drudgery.
14!
And while admittedly, Beercan tends towards the electrified and distorted, we've got nothing against a good mellow tune now and again. But 14 tracks of a guitar, a singer and non-stop sob stories? No thanks. Here're some of the track titles - "Looks Like Death", "Beautiful Storm", "Take It All Away"...get the picture?

Look, I hope the guys of Mature Addiction are proud of this album and I hope it was cathartic for them or whatever, but I can't even go with my usual nice-guy cop-out of, "well, this isn't really my thing" as I actively disliked this CD.

14?!?! (www.geocities.com/mature_addiction)

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Romantic Robots - Self-Titled LP - Super-scuzzy sounding lo-fi punk drek from Italy. Why is there so much late-50's/early 60's space travel imagery linked with this type of music? Do primitive sounding guitars automatically remind people early space travel? Kind of like with garage-rock and old horror-film stuff along the lines of frankensteins, werewolves, etc. I've never really gotten that as it seems kind of shoehorned in...in order to fit a genre. Whatever the answer, it seems like there's some of that same shoehorning going on here.

In my mind's ear, if you're going to be stripped down this far on the sonic-scale, you've got to jazz it up with some speedy numbers now and again or add in some distortion freak-outs or something. For the most part though, this CD kind of clangs along at mid-tempo. At times, it sounds a lot like some of the Action Swingers earlier stuff. Unfortunately though, a decent amount of the Action Swingers earlier stuff is pretty shitty. (www.myspace.com/romanticrobots)

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