Music, like everything, works on a cyclical basis. In the early stages of a genre, popularity spreads like an unearthly plague to everything it touches and then, just as quickly as it came about, it disappears. Emo is one such genre; I’m sure you’ll have noticed the word rearing it’s ugly head in every other review as of late. The problem with this popularity is that as it grows every man and his dog has a crack at this new found genre and this is, inevitably, what sends said genre right back round the circle to the bottom. Take Muscle and Bone for instance, their new album, ‘Peace & Light’, is about to take everything you love from the ‘new’ emo revival and send it right into the fucking ground.
Now I’m not one to point the finger at a particular element in a record to bring the whole thing down, it is a collaborative effort after all, but honestly I have to in this instance, it’s just the vocals. Imagine, if you will, Rivers Cuomo from Weezer but really, really annoying. There are points when it’s so obviously out of tune that I can’t believe it made it past the band’s approval and, better yet, a producers.
Peace & Light by Muscle and Bone
The record aside from this isn’t too bad really, there’s some alright guitar riffs and some really grungy moments that would make you want to sway along with your eyes closed. Like that episode on The Simpsons when Sonic Youth play, there’s a GIF of it floating around on Tumblr somewhere I’m sure. These glimpses of something that could be half decent though are far too rare in an album of eleven tracks, it just sounds to me like the band are trying so hard to sound like everyone else around at the moment and unfortunately, you’ve been beaten to it lads.
My normal process with my writing is that I listen to the record and make initial notes that end up forming the skeletal structure of my review. At points with this record I hadn’t even wrote anything because in the first few tracks I had covered the initial themes, which are essentially: heard it before and awful vocals. This might seem harsh but if you want evidence of these claims, you can find the album on the Black Numbers record label now.
The only people I can imagine liking this record are the people who show up far too late in the genre’s popularity cycle and try to pretend that they were there from the beginning. “Hey man, I was at the first Muscle and Bone Show." Oh, fuck off.
1/5
‘Peace & Light’ by Muscle and Bone is out now on Black Numbers.
Muscle and Bone links: Facebook|Twitter|Bandcamp
Words by Shaun Cole
