EP review: Hope & State – Grand Gestures

Hope & State are a rare bird indeed – an unsigned band who don’t feel the need to send out a dozen pages of unreadable printed guff with their music. The press release for the Grand Gestures EP features no band portraits, no lengthy biography starting with the drummer’s first band at college, no morass of soundbites clipped from websites of dubious authority and repute (much like this one, in fact)… it’s almost as if they wanted to let their music speak for itself. What novelty! And you know what? It works; these four tracks are solid old-school pop-punk tunes, simple and catchy as hell.

But what do they sound like?, I hear you ask. Well… they’re a bit like an emo-ish Idlewild (or maybe an English iteration of Cooper), complete with Roddy Woomble chorus hooks and Alkaline Trio chord sequences played through brittle clean-but-cranked guitars. The vocals are refreshingly untreated; it sounds to me like frontman Imran Siddiqi is reaching for a range he can’t quite hold in EP opener “London Oh London”, but I’d rather hear someone strain and fail to do it in the raw than slap on the pitch correction for bubblegum perfection. The other tunes are plainly in a more suitable key for Mr Siddiqi’s throat, letting him hold down the regular-joe no-frills verses and soar up for the occasional chorus ending.

Something about Hope & State makes me hark back to the late nineties, when pop-punk still meant something very different to the haircuts and energy-drink endorsements that it represents nowadays. Hope & State are all about simple melodies, memorable hooks, uplifting chorus changes and earnest delivery. The production here is cheap and cheerful, but it proves a favourite point of mine: decent tunes will shine through a low budget recording, but you can’t polish a turd. Hope & State don’t need any polish, they just need an audience, and I recommend you think about providing them one. Promising stuff.