The one upside of the proliferation of identikit pop-punk clones is that they’ve produced an ecosystem where bands with a more unique sense of what makes a good tune can flourish and grow. Portsmouth’s Cut The Blue Wire are like one of those crafty lifeforms David Attenborough likes to point out; at first glance they’re mimicking their more numerous neighbours, but closer inspection reveals them putting down roots and waiting for the inevitable die-off to give them space to colonise.
And here’s their first proper release, the Revert Restart Reset EP. Right from the opening bars of “Everest”, there’s a sense of familiarity tempered with something fresh; call it the scent of the path less travelled, perhaps. Cut The Blue Wire’s guitar work owes more to metal than punk - at least as far as the melodies themselves are concerned - but the tone is much more restrained, light on brash crunch and strong on glassy clear sounds that engage the ear by stitching in and out of the synth pads. This is something you may not have encountered recently if you’ve been trapped in the bowels of the Epitaph catalogue; it’s called “song-writing”. Look it up.
There’s no restraint of pace, however. Cut The Blue Wire don’t play especially fast, but they have that breakneck sense of hurrying through every tune as if eager to start playing you the next one, an urgency and sincerity that seems absent from so many of their peers. The Revert Restart Reset EP comprises six snappy tracks, all shorter than three minutes in length, and all mercifully devoid of saccharine lyrical cliché and false sentiment.
Yup - no soppy high-school heartbreak or middle-class angst here, and no faux-Californian accents or strangled screaming, either. That said, singer DD Ball’s impassioned wail may take a little while to get used to, simply because it’s such a constant; a little more dynamic variation might throw the frantic parts into sharper contrast, but it might also derail that sense of pace somewhat, which would be a shame. The Revert Restart Reset EP’s bright but fierce pop edge is its best feature, like all the best bits of Hundred Reasons and At The Drive-In stirred sneakily into the guitar-pop template like amphetamines into orange-juice.
Pop-prog-post-electro-hardcore? It’s not as implausible as it sounds, not to mention a lot more pleasant… and while we’ll need to wait for a full album from Cut the Blue Wire to see whether it can last the course, we can always dance while we’re waiting.
[Transparency moment: Cut The Blue Wire are a local band in my town, and I've known them for some time. But I've been reviewing records for much longer... and if I thought they weren't worth it, I'd have made an excuse not to review them at all. Take that as you will.]
Related articles:
Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Cut The Blue Wire, pop, post-hardcore, punk, Revert Restart Reset
