Add To Catch A Thief to the ever-growing list of obviously talented British bands trapping themselves in a blind alley of style. The Your Eyes Will Burn EP is beautifully performed and produced, but it’s nothing you’ve not heard time and again in the last year or so.
It’s kind of a shame. I’m not suggesting To Catch A Thief have sat down and decided to play flavour of the moment emo-core for any reason other than that it’s the music that moves them - the songwriting is far too solid and earnest to be a cynical grasp for the bandwagon - but as good as it is at a nuts and bolts level, the Your Eyes Will Burn EP will end up lost in the jostling crowd of records that sound exactly the same as it.
You can’t even tell To Catch A Thief are from the UK, let alone Scotland - Ali Lane’s voice is pretty impressive for the style and breaks up nicely on the high notes, but if you’d told me he was from Hicksville, New England I’d not have batted an eyelid. The staccato angular riffs played on bright guitar tones, the taut and snappy drumming and melodic basslines… it’s all solid stuff. Your Eyes Will Burn is evidently the work of talented musicians, there’s no denying that. But apart form the occasional flash of progressive architecture, it’s pure vanilla.
It’s not their fault, of course, but it’s a definite issue - this sound is at saturation point, so ubiquitous as to be inescapable, and I can’t help but feel To Catch A Thief would benefit hugely from finding their own unique sound. The Your Eyes Will Burn EP is a great piece of work from a young band, but it’s a few years too late to be groundbreaking, and there’s rarely prizes kept back for the latecomers.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: emo, post-hardcore, To Catch A Thief, Your Eyes Will Burn
