AUTUMN FEW
Wasn’t Buffy the Vampire Slayer brilliant! (And bang goes 50% of the potential readers of this review. No, please stay. Please.).
I mean, it had everything, didn’t it. There were great fight scenes, fantastic witty one liners and a very photogenic cast. There was something for everyone. Teenage boys loved it because they could drool over Sarah Michelle Gellar. Likewise teenage girls could spend 45 minutes a week adoring the brooding, re-ensouled Angel.
There was also a rather obvious parallel between demons metaphorical of the real world and demons actual in the fictional world. Academics loved it because it investigated weighty topics like Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power, feminism and post-modern linguistics.
And there was something for music fans too. Thanks to the series I discovered the likes of Nikka Costa, Tom McRae and Michelle Branch. Ok, maybe that last one was a bit of a mistake. Buffy and its spin off show Angel also rewarded this writer’s viewing by featuring artists such as Ryan Adams, The Dandy Warhols and Aimee Mann.
Musically speaking, these two series were gifts that just kept on giving (providing you were prepared to be the one who actually trundled down to the record shop and hand over cash for the latest Sunnydale inspired discovery).
Music was a central theme to Buffy. One of the show’s central characters, Oz (Seth Green) even played bass for Dingoes Ate My Baby (the stage name for Four Star Mary). And it is here, finally, that my review of Kent’s Autumn Few actually begins.
There is something undeniably So-Cal about this south-eastern act. And the comparison with Oz’s band is not just a tenuous reason for me to evangelise about an old TV favourite. Autumn Few’s eponymous debut EP shares a softcore rock style with Four Star Mary. Stripped of the vocal (Sean Hardy’s voice undoubtedly belongs to our side of the Atlantic), at least three of the EP’s songs wouldn’t sound so out of place on FSM’s Thrown to the Wolves.
Autumn Few’s sound has a high octane feel to it. There’s an energy and drive to all four songs that simply won’t go away. Punchy guitars, catchy bass riffs and spot on drums. All of which would sound well placed in The Bronze, after a hard night’s vampire slaying.
The South Californian comparison survives lyrical scrutiny too. Autumn Few’s songs convey a sense of angst familiar to many bands in their genre. There’s a great deal of soul searching, frustration at being misunderstood and general dissatisfaction with life – whether these are feelings that are being explained or addressed. So, you’ll find the band confronting their demons with lines like ‘Why don’t you like what I’m standing for?’ from ‘Lines’ and ‘No you never really noticed me’ from ‘Never Noticed Me’.
Elsewhere, the lyrics offer advice that someone is ‘better off not listening to all your fears/all your tears and hideaways’, while ‘Casting Shadows’ is all about inspiring the self-doubter: ‘Realise in time your elegance is grown’. It’s almost as if the latter two songs are a response to the worries found in the first two.
The musical anomaly you’ll find is in ‘Casting Stones’, the EP’s third track. Here, the sound is less similar to America’s south-west and more like England’s north-east. The song has a distinct Maxïmo Park feel to it in the way Hardy attacks the lyrics, repeating phrases in quick succession to add to the song’s bite.
Nevertheless, there is a consistency here that allows all four songs to sit beside one another. The trans-Atlantic genre wandering is not so odd as to leave the listener confused. It shows the band are able to explore different sounds, while retaining a clear sense of identity.
We are, of course, being a little bit behind the times here. Autumn Few’s debut has, in fact, been around for a while and the band are on the verge of releasing a sophomore EP. But as RockKent.com’s only been around for a week or so, I hope you’ll forgive the late arrival to the party.
With a new set of tracks just around the corner, you should have just enough time to download and digest the debut in readiness for This Night Only. Which probably isn’t too bad an idea really.
22/03/2011 • EP Review
By Stephen Morris • Photos by
One Response to “AUTUMN FEW”
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On March 22nd, 2011 at 12:39 pm
me like!