The Borderline Saints
Straitjackets & the usual medication

Sweden stands for quality in music. There's no country in the world with so many good and successful bands per capita than Sweden. If you want something good, go Scandinavian. However, if I wanted I could describe this EP by Swedish The Borderline Saints as something short, familiar, completely uninventive and with a production and sound quality far from decent. I could describe it as a four track and fourteen minutes short EP with predictable songs, a boring vocalist, mediocre musicians and so on and so on… I could have done that, but despite all of this I wont. Because regardless of what it is and what it isn't, I think 'Straitjackets And The Usual Medication' is one of the freshest winds from the 2012 spring.

However, let me tell you what I don't think before getting to what I think. The press information tells us that this is a band with an unique sound, that they have guitar riffs that gives you goosebumps and as they start to name drop genres that this band is suppose to play I just sigh from how ridicules it all gets "power pop embedded into rock, metal and scream" have you heard anything as silly? Clearly we all hear what kind of music it is when we play it, the press doesn't needs to get told what it is because I don't think any of those genres hits the target anyway.

"Well excuse me mister negative" you all think "But what is it that you actually think then?". I do like the feel of the album. I like the energy it spreads, the joy and enthusiasm the music has and the melodies. The music has a nice flow, shortly said. The first song, called Cruel World, is probably the weakest song of the lot. At least it begins very poor but then it catches on and only gets better as the time ticks closer to the 3.52 it last. The second song is the title track and it's actually almost the complete opposite, getting more boring as time goes by. I especially have a hard time accepting the most extreme of the screams that comes in the later part of the songs as they hurt the flow and tempo of the song quite badly with that.

I think the best two tracks of the album are the pair making up the second half of the EP. My favorite of the four is the concluding track, called Cheers, which is a joyful and nice rock song made to be played almost anytime and anywhere. In other words, as the weakest opens the album and the best close it, I think this EP only gets better and better as time goes along. There's much I don't like about it and things I wonder if they really need but overall I think it's great. They have plenty of keyboards, double guitars, double vocals and lots of stuff going on, but their energy shines through and the result feels both cheerful and interesting. They have some work to do on the "boring" side with production, mixing and sound quality, but regardless I like what I hear! And I look forward to hear more from them. Perhaps the big surprise of 2012?

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