Exile Parade
Hit the Zoo

Don’t you just get overly suspicious when labels come talking about the long awaited debut album of some band you’ve never heard of? “Long awaited, yeah right” I tend to think when I read those things, has there ever been a long awaited debut album? Maybe but this is not it, not saying it is bad, yet, but it sure can’t have been long awaited considering the lack of review results that came up when I searched the web. It seems like the release of this album has been completely missed rather than anything else and the lack of writing about them along with a piss poor website in terms of information on the band made the information gathering about this album rather difficult. This especially considering the fact that the promo sheet that followed this album said nothing but a bunch of useless talk about the (very) few medias that actually noticed this band and that some guy named Owen Morris (who apparently is known from a band called Oasis) had produced their EP that was released in 2009 and stuff about tours and other junk that is of no relevance to this album. Who was the difficult producer(s) that delayed the album, did the same production team finish the album or were they fired? Charismatic singer, organic guitars, shows in china, that doesn’t tell if any guests appeared on this album or which studio that was used and who made the dreadful album cover art and so on, that information that we want to provide on the left side. Still, bad marketing does not mean bad music, does it? No it does’t, quite childish talking against what I say like that.

Musically it is sort of britpoppish which was sort of almost said in the promo sheet but with a rock edge to it, in some songs. Other songs are balladish but not quite ballads most of the time and then we have some songs that are, well I don’t know what they are to be honest. The production and sound is adequate for what it is even though the album is sprouting in all directions like the band wanted a little foot in every kind of imaginable direction, which makes it a tad difficult to really pinpoint a general view of the sound of this band. It is varied, the singer sounds typically like a british singer which makes the claim about a charismatic singer in the promo sheet quite strange but maybe they think every britpop singer is charismatic despite the obvious fact that they sound roughly the same. The album is eleven tracks and 47 minutes long which is a time that on paper is acceptable.

I think it is a difficult album to really judge as it is so very incoherent and you really does not come to terms with how it is laid out and let alone how they selected the songs for the it as the selection does not make any sense at all. There are songs that are fast and then comes some strange thing with fast guitars and stupid slow singing or something completely different, a ballad pops in and then a song that seems like taken from another planet i placed behind it. It sounds more like someone’s personal collection of songs on an MP3-player rather than an album by a band. It feels rushed and ill-conceived and not really thought about at all. There are also both songs that are really good and songs that are so bad that you just want to stick a fork in you left eye and pull that eye out and eat it because that seems like a better way to waste your time than listening to a song like the ending track Shadow. You know the feeling. But there’s good stuff as well, Astronaut is a great track and one that stands up very well against anything, Fire Walk With Me and If I’m Not Famous are other tracks that makes a good impression. But then we have tracks like Movie Maker, Get Your Gun Boy, Man is Sick and the worst song I can imagine at the moment, Shadow.

So with tracks that range from great to sickening it is hard to pinpoint a rating for this album but I would say that the negatives in the end outweigh the positives as they are more and the overall impression that it is just a messed up collection of songs randomly selected and arranged cannot be overlooked. So I’ll keep a few tracks before forever tossing this album into the garbage as instructed by Stephen Hawking.