Album review: Attack! Attack! – [self-titled]

“Honesty didn’t get me anywhere… I know, because I read it in your diary…” goes the disingenuous opening vocal line of the eponymous début album from Cardiff’s Attack! Attack!. Well, maybe honesty didn’t get them anywhere in the fictional space of the song itself, but the album as a whole just goes to show what a difference some musical honesty can make.

You see, the thing that’s been annoying me more and more about the pop-rock explosion is the horrible glossy finish that gets slapped all over everything. It’s like some Pixar-produced CGI facsimile of itself, each iteration sounding further and further from what a band with instruments actually sound like. No such problems for Attack! Attack!, though – unless my review copy has been mastered wrong by accident, their first offering has a nice saturated tone to it that makes me slightly nostalgic for my days of listening to the Evening Session on a cheap FM radio.

Seriously, I’m not kidding – Attack! Attack! play amped-up guitars and bass that actually sound like amped-up guitars and bass; the drums are real drums, and not retriggered, quantized and pitch-perfect samples; and in the pacey sections the compressed cymbals splash and suck like the tide between the piles of an old pier. Attack! Attack! sound like… well, they sound like a proper rock band.

And it’s amazing how much of a difference that makes to my perception of their tunes, which aren’t particularly innovative or original (though perfectly competent for the style). Everything comes across with an unfeigned sense of passion and energy – Attack! Attack! sound like they wrote this stuff from the heart, and they play it like it’s their last chance to leave the planet before the asteroid hits. Listen to the riff from recent single “This Is A Test”, or the opening of “Say It To Me”: that’s how a pop-punk riff should be played. You can almost feel the soreness in your fingertips as they grate over the frets, the ache in your wrists and ankles as you batter the drumkit…

Attack! Attack! isn’t the perfect album, but compared to all the stuff I’ve heard from the same bracket in recent months, they’re streets ahead. Oh, sure, the songs are youth incarnate: “From Now On” sees the honesty meme raise its head again, and there’s plenty of ambiguous pop-punk relationship cheddar (“Lights Out”, for example). But that energy makes almost any sin forgiveable – if you’re old enough, Attack! Attack! will make you remember why you loved early Feeder, Cooper and Foo Fighters.

Attack! Attack! are a timely reminder that rock and pop can meet halfway without crashing into one another in a tangle of dismembered integrity and intentions. The whole album roars through fast with its foot to the floor, and all of a sudden you’re sat in the silence following the final note, and seriously thinking about putting it back on again. And why the hell not, eh?