Sunday 30 December 2012

Smoke Off Vinyl - One For The Road

Single review by kev@thesoundofconfusion.co.uk


It can be interesting to see which acts influence a band's music or who they'd put themselves in a similar bracket to. Chicago's Smoke Off Vinyl have this new two track single available from their Bandcamp page where they tag Explosions In The Sky and Godspeed You! Black Emperor (so we can expect a post-rock thing going on) as well as Band Of Horses, Pink Floyd and Pearl Jam (so we can expect their post-rock to be more song-based than drawn-out atmospherics) and also Snow Patrol (how the hell is that going to work then?). They also tag "epic" and "classic rock" and both songs are around the five-minute mark which seems reasonable for this sort of thing, but we're still not sure how you combine Godspeed... and Snow Patrol.

Somehow they do manage to fuse these other bands together, with 'The Night The World Waved Goodbye' having a clear, anthemic indie-rock sound that bursts into an inferno of post-rock guitar towards the end. At this point they're totally soaring, everything works brilliantly, even if the beginning did seem a little watered-down. They opt for a similar widescreen alt-rock intro for 'One For The Road' but it almost feels like a compromise. They could do with losing the Snow Patrol here and getting a bit more guts, some more bite. Again the guitars do begin to lift the song but it never achieves the heights of 'The Night...' and then the vocals turn a little Chad Kroeger which isn't great. Smoke Off Vinyl are potentially sitting on a great idea here, they just need to iron out the creases and they could be on to a winner.



Smoke Off Vinyl's website

Buy the single





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