The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.
Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.
Lord knows how they have tried.
To quote the infamous Drowned in Sound article: "If and when it does eventually arrive, critics will likely revel in the prolonged back story above critiquing the final recording." Challenge accepted. (If you do want the hot goss, please read that article! It's a spicy meatball.) I probably have the benefit of coming into it without that fourteen year wait bearing down on The Secret Sessions, and indeed, it is a good album detached from that. It's not amazing, this isn't even Between the Lines, let alone Finelines, but if nothing else, it's nice to have an official lid on the band's mid-2000s MySpace demos so they can, at long last, move on. (I know it well, when creative things get away from you. No judgment here.)
My big issue with The Secret Sessions is the mastering. They go for this thick space rock attack of compressed drums, synths, and guitars that crunch a la Finelines' "C.O.R." interlude and darkly shimmer a la "Taprobane", but the entire thing is so muddy, booming, blatantly lossy-sourced (possibly due to the data loss Som Wardner alludes to in the album's announcement post), it sounds like it's coming through a car stereo--not great! Time reveals that the space rock tones are mostly a put on over classic My Vitriol sounds and songs, the driving riffs of "If Only", the fainting dreaminess of "Rest Your Tired Head", and "Falling Off the Floor"'s cousin in detuned moodiness "This Time", which is the good part. As a whole though, The Secret Sessions is exhausted and overcooked, a collection of ten perfectly good, awfully-mixed electronic-tinged rock songs that sounds less like a band and more like one guy going nuts in his home studio for a decade and a half.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "If Only (God Only Knows)", "Rest Your Tired Head", "The Agonies and the Ecstacies" | "It's So Damn Easy" | "Lord Knows How I've Tried" |  |
| Download from My Vitriol's Bandcamp | |||
Uniquely (unfortunately) singular.
Oh, My Vitriol. You are the posterchildren for the idea that you have your whole life to write your first record and six months (or maybe two decades) to write the second. Far be it from the mousy monolith of guitars you'd expect from the shoegaze label that constantly gets applied to it, Finelines is a heavy, gothic-tinged 48-minute masterwork with the gutsy screams and sighs of singer-guitarist Som Wardner on all but four of its tracks. For a debut, it's unusually realized. This is the kind of album a band makes three albums in, but a couple of UCL grads knocked it out in two years, laying the foundation for 2000sgaze as a movement--and that was it. 23 years and counting, no followup ever materialized.
The backstory aside, what makes Finelines so distinctive is how much musical muscle the band displays on it. While Som's singing and Seth Taylor's shimmering, rumbling guitarwork conjure the storm, Ravi Kesavaram's tireless, pummeling drumming keeps the studs nailed to the floor. It's another reason I don't find the shoegaze tag altogether fitting; the vocals are always present, never buried, temperamental like all good rock vocals are, and these guys blast out walls of sound like the effervescent "Always: Your Way", the ominous "Ode to the Red Queen", or the fittingly psychotic "Losing Touch" like absolutely nothing. I hate to belabor the point--one instant classic is more than any of us ever fucking accomplished--but these guys really could've been one of the best-selling rock bands in the world.
| Essential: | Quintessential: | Non-Essential: | Rating: |
|---|---|---|---|
| "Grounded", "Ode to the Red Queen", "Windows and Walls" | "Alpha Waves"/"Always: Your Way" | 404 not found |  |
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