My esteemed colleague Duncan shredded Severe Zero’s recent single with great vigour, and I thought it unfair to make him (and the band) run the same gauntlet a second time. So it falls to me to pass judgement on their self-released album, Dead Air - are they really as dreadful as all that?
Dreadful, no. Dull? Predictable? Uninspired? Afraid so. It may be fitting that Dead Air is a radio deejay term for the dreaded experience of the station broadcasting nothing due to some studio screw-up; I guess the implication is that everything else sounds like dead air by comparison to Severe Zero, but the reality is a sad reversal of that.
They’re not a bad band, seriously - they make a competent noise. But labelling themselves ‘punk’ is a stretch two times too far - they’d have been pegged at the light end of indie in the early nineties, and on today’s musical landscape they’re some distance south of the Sum/Blinks as far as sonic edge and bite is concerned. Dead Air suffers terribly from the fact that there’s only one guitar at work; nothing against three-pieces but the only way to make ‘em sound big is to stick to unison riffs… or get a rhythm guitarist in to beef things up. Bass and arpeggios alone do not a punk song make.
Which isn’t to say Severe Zero haven’t made an effort to make each song unique. But that effort falls short, because they’re just grab-bagging from the past thirty years of popular guitar music without actually adding any spark to their collages. Five tracks into Dead Air’s total of thirteen, and already the songs are blurring into each other, an undifferentiated stream of thin guitar tone and samey vocals that attempt to make up for character with enthusiasm. Like I say, they’ve tried really hard… but Severe Zero just don’t have that natural edge, and Dead Air demonstrates it can’t be faked or forced.
Lead track “Weapons Grade” balances watered-down emo-shrieking with an out-of-place vocoder treatment midway through, and then “Lack Of Trust” recycles every half-arsed protest lyric about TV media brainwashing ever; thirty years ago this was something important to say, but now that Severe Zero’s target demographic are spending more time on the web than in front of the electric nipple, isn’t this admonition a bit wasted? It certainly isn’t going to resonate with an audience who aren’t force-fed media so much as they binge-drink it. Like, yeah, whatever… hey, what’s on the end of this link?
At Dead Air’s midpoint (or thereabouts) “Silence on the Radio” takes on exactly that Millennial-Generation consumerist media-grazing lifestyle, attempting to bring it down with a barrage of observations lacking solutions. It’s an unconsciously ironic gesture from Severe Zero, considering they’re self-releasing their début album through “all major download stores”. That’s punk rock for you - fight the tide of crap by contributing to it, man!
“Falls Away” asks us “do you like the sound of / the kettle boiling?”, and the solo from “Between the Fires” sounds like it belongs to another song entirely: it’s out of time, it’s not mixed in to the soundfield, and if it’s supposed to be some postmodern context-breaker then it trips over its own metaphorical clown shoes - all it manages to do is make me wonder which of the other albums waiting to be reviewed might stand better odds of keeping me awake until it ends.
I feel sorry for Severe Zero in some ways, because they’re good musicians. But Dead Air isn’t a good album - they’re either not ready for it yet, or they don’t have the inner sharpness they so clearly aspire to. No amount of artificial colouring and garnish can disguise the flavour of vanilla.
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