AVAGRACE – TWOTHOUSAND&ELEVEN EP REVIEW

Avagrace - Photographer Unknown

Dear Reader

Let me make a full and frank confession. I can’t stand most emo or nu metal music. Anything which boasts existential crises as its USP is definitely and most certainly not for me.

I find much of the music incredibly samey: one band’s song about feeling a bit lonely is exactly the same as another band’s song about feeling a bit miffed.

There’s a loud bit, a gloomy quiet bit and then the band unleash the big guns with an almighty sonic assault on your ears that sounds just like the last sonic assault you heard from the last bunch of doom merchants you heard. It all gets a bit tedious really.

Maybe I’m fast getting too old for that sort of music (I suspect I always was). I’d much rather settle down with pretty much anything else:

The Webb Brothers, The Webb Sisters, ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’.

Just don’t make me listen to another adolescent rant about why nice girls don’t like you.

Which makes life as a reviewer of an eclectic range of music rather difficult. Kent, it seems, boasts a rich tradition of the sort of music I’ve spent the last few paragraphs moaning about. What’s a reviewer to do?

Grin, bear it, keep calm, carry on.

So, we can pretty much firmly establish that the work of AvaGrace is not quite this writer’s cup of tea. (Milk, one sugar. Thanks).

Nevertheless, it would take some kind of musical moron to suggest AvaGrace’s music was anything other than a prime, perfect, impeccable example of its genre. The production of their ‘twothousand&eleven’ EP is excellent, the vocals are spot on and the music is masterly.

What’s not to like?

The lyrics, as you might expect, concern the usual mixture of voyages of self-discovery (‘But I have to know what goes on inside my head’ and ‘All this time I’m trying to find the answer’ from ‘Still in Motion’) and anger with others: ‘You’re here again, just to pull me down’ (‘Here Again’) and ‘I believed everything you told me…one too many times’ (‘Lost’).

The band even goes so far as putting an instrumental track on their EP, making one quarter of the record wordless. It’s a fairly unusual thing really.

Most bands feel obliged to scatter even the least well written lyrics over a tune in order to justify its existence as a proper piece of music – especially on something as short as an EP. It’s to AvaGrace’s credit that they have the insight to let the music speak for itself.

And so everything is in its right place. In AvaGrace you’ll find traces of every angst ridden rock act from early Manic Street Preachers by way of chugging nu-metal through to the latest emo act.

For a more local comparison, Avagrace are pitched somewhere between the in-your-face rage of Promise Me Tomorrow and Left of the Right Side at one end of the spectrum and the brooding sumptuousness of Motion Picture Soundtrack at the other.

The rise and fall of the tunes, the texture and – of course – the volume show AvaGrace are onto a good thing. When they say on their Facebook profile ‘we’ve finally found our sound’ they do themselves something of an injustice in failing to say that sound is bang on.

It’s quite an impressive feat really. If an act like AvaGrace can make a fey indie type like this writer sit up and pay attention, maybe, just maybe, this band might be onto something.

And with that, I think it’s time to return to some of that fey indie music I was talking about just now…

Find out more about the band on their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/AvaGrace-UK/203674836342498