Written
by David Shouse, posted by blog admin
Slow
Burning Car’s fourth studio release, Defection, is an invigorating musical ride
from start to finish. They don’t simply bludgeon listeners into submission with
a power chord guitar rock attack – there’s ample intelligence powering the
band’s ten songs and they never confine themselves to a single musical
approach. Instead, Defection crackles with the same imaginative energy
enlivening the band’s previous three releases and, not unexpectedly, finds that
the band continues to refine their approach thus focusing their muscle and
concentration. Even the album’s comparatively muted tunes surge with raw
creativity and carry listeners away from the first. Their musicianship is
equally impossible to deny – they are a band whose performances and songwriting
alike command the audience’s attention from the outset and bring us along on a
memorable journey. Slow Burning Car’s Defection is an effective and important
release in this band’s career.
It
begins in a powerful, muscular fashion with the track “Alpha Duplicor”. It’s
well worth remarking on the band’s talent for whipping up heavy guitars while
their songs, no matter the tempo, continue to exert an across the board light
touch. That point is driven further home by the album’s second song “Soul Crimes”.
Slow Burning Car turns up the pace here in a big way and the guitar attack is
charging even harder than before, but there’s never any sense of too much going
on here and the production balances things out in an artful, yet physical, way.
“The Orb” comes off as a live take and the way Adam Idell’s drumming brings us
into the song reinforces that. Even if this isn’t really a hot take captured
for posterity, the band deserves kudos for successfully making it feel like
that. The grinding, stop-start quality of the song’s arrangement crossed with
vocalist Troy Spiropoulos’ nearly hissed delivery is very notable. “Devil in
the Room” is the first of the album’s definite bows to Slow Burning Car’s punk
rock influences and they are every bit as artful bringing that sound into the
album’s mix as they are with their other musical inclinations. “You Can’t Stay
Here” is another track in that vein and has a much clearer lineage to the form
while still twisting the track with the band’s own idiosyncratic songwriting
touch.
“Bedtime”
is the more memorable of the band’s two acoustic focused tracks while the
second to last song, “Polar Warden”, is a surprising instrumental full of atmospherics
and instrumentation that doesn’t appear in the earlier tracks. The album
concludes with “Clouds”, another unexpected stylistic turn that reinforces the
band’s willingness to throw audiences’ expectations out the window. They acquit
themselves well with a variety of styles and it is to their credit as both
songwriters and musicians that they never fail to sound credible. Slow Burning
Car’s Defection is a well thought out, musically entertaining release full of
intelligent, accessible songwriting.
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