TIN SOLDIERS
Tin Soldiers
It’s a truth universally denied that each generation thinks it invented sex. There’s probably a couple of reasons for this. One: it’s often difficult to empathise with people who are different to you on such a deeply intimate level. Two: no one likes to think of their parents at it.
And the same is true for boredom and dissatisfaction. Many a teenager will think they were the ones who discovered boredom; that they were the first ones to realise exactly how unfair the world really is – despite bucket loads of evidence to the contrary. Witness the I can’t get no satisfactioneering of the 1960s, the punk of the 70s, Mancunian miserbleness in the 80s, grunge of the 90s and the emo onslaught of the first decade of the new century.
And so to Tin Soldiers who wear their disillusioned hearts on their collective sleeves with pride throughout their album, Telling Tales. Theirs is a heavy rocking sound mixing a plethora of US punk bands (Blink-182, Sum 41 and any other band with a number in their name), Foo Fighters and Generation Terrorists through to Everything Must Go era Manic Street Preachers.
As with many a band a misunderstood malcontents, Tin Soldiers like to thrash out their misery in the loudest possible way. What’s the point of being fed up if you can’t leap around, create an ear bleeding noise and enjoy yourself a bit while you’re about it? The result is a riot of sound with the occasional impassioned rock ballad (see “Just About Us” and others) thrown in for good measure.
It’s a big-big sound with big sounding James Dean Bradfield vocals on tracks like “Word’s Got Out” and “Just What I Needed”. A thrashing guitar is never more than an inch away and the songs race along so fast and furious that Vin Diesel might consider calling it a day.
The themes of the songs are fairly interchangeable. A fairly decent summary of the whole album can be found on “The Nothing Song” with its repeated mantra of “nothing’s changed it’s all the same/it’s all the same and nothing’s new” and other lyrics about feeling nothing.
You can find numbness and weariness of sameness throughout the record. “Pull The Trigger” opens with the line “it’s the same as before/just done in a different way” while “Day By Day” is about the fear of fading away and a need for peace. Meanwhile “Five By Five” continues the theme of restlessness and disillusion with lines about not fitting in and “calling for change”.
And when change does come, it’s usually not of the good variety. “24 Hours” and “Just About Us” are about the agony of a stagnating relationship finally breaking down completely.
Other songs, meanwhile, are just about a vague search for answers. You’ll find it there in “Wait For You”, “Telling Tales” and again in “Day By Day”. Lines like “looking for answers to the things we’re never told” abound throughout the album. It’s a record of restlessness and yearning for something better.
Even when the mood gets a little brighter in “Just What I Need”, there remains a sense of the intangible. There are lines like “it’s just what I needed” where “it” is neither defined nor explained. We’ll never know what “it” is. And maybe neither will Tin Soldiers.
There’s nothing particularly new in the music or lyrics here, which is perhaps fitting given one of the themes of the album. But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There’s enough thought and craftsmanship here to deserve many listens, and the variety in sound and texture of the songs provides both floor fillers and (slightly) more meditative numbers for solo listening.
Following a few listens, Telling Tales turns into a bit of a grower. The fusion of themes of despair, longing and desire for change emerge from a chrysalis of apparent sameness into something rather more powerful – almost moving.
10/04/2011 • Album Review
By Stephen Morris • Photos by
One Response to “TIN SOLDIERS”
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On May 4th, 2011 at 4:52 am
Thanks for some quality points there. I am kind of new to online , so I printed this off to put in my file, any better way to go about keeping track of it then printing?