Band Name: Fire Assassins

Myspace: www.myspace.com/fireassassins

Reviewer: Keef

Review:

‘Restless Heart’ - ‘Fire Assasins’ describe their varied influences as being mostly 80s era – ranging from Metallica to Rick Springfield. ‘Restless Heart’ opens up like a tribute to The Cranberries or even The Corrs, with a very tuneful, if a little light, acoustic guitar and violin intro. Not a bad start, but not really ‘rock’ music…..

And then it all goes a bit early 70s. Now – again, that’s no bad thing, but the vocals sound like someone who’s trying to do a really poor Chris DeBurgh impression for a laugh – only thing is, I think it’s supposed to be a serious vocal melody. At over 7 minutes, this track just drags on too long.

‘Do You Remember’ - is a different kettle of fish entirely. OK, so it’s ’80s rock by numbers’ and entirely predictable, but I guess that’s half the charm of that type of music in the first place – it’s instantly recogniseable. I have to say the vocals are a huge improvement on this track, maybe it’s a pitching thing, but it’s far less forced and actually not that bad.

‘Midnight’ is more of the same. Predictable 80s rock. It has the same ‘charm’ as the previous track – but fails again on the strained vocals and being overly long. There’s a great solo and melody change towards the end of the track, but after that ‘high’, it just repeats the original riff for another minute and kind of kills the interest that the solo brought to the track.

‘Keep Christmas Alive in your Heart’. This is a terrible track – sorry guys, but it’s just not even good in a bad way. The Darkness kind of got away with a cheesy Festive song, but you’re not The Darkness. If for no other reason than the appalling wailing that is being passed off as ‘vocals’, you need to get rid of this track, as it really shows off all your bad points……

‘Outside Looking In’ – yet more rock by numbers. Sorry – but it’s getting quite tedious now and the vocals – well, they’re just getting progressively flatter and sounding more like the worst of (insert reality TV ‘talent’ show here). Another one for the bin.

‘Turn Away’. OK – what a great start! LOVE the opening to this track, as it at least shows some thought – but it then just falls apart in a big way.
We’ve now moved to ‘rock ballad by numbers’ – with ‘backing vocals’. I’m deliberately steering away from calling them ‘vocal harmonies’, because they are neither of those things. I’ve no idea whether this is both parties wailing away or a bit of double tracking, but it’s painful to say the least.
‘Turn Away’ is aptly named for reviewers – because that’s what most people will do listening to this.

‘Long Way Back’ - another pleasantly constructed 80s inspired rock by numbers track – offering nothing new and completely ruined by the vocals…..

There’s quite obviously one talented musician in this group, which makes the fact that there’s some painfully out of tune vocals on these tracks unforgiveable.

Keef

Band Name: Outrageous Rhinoceros

Myspace: www.myspace.com/outrageousrhinoceros

Reviewer: Keef

Review:

I guess when the band’s ‘Sounds Like’ list doesn’t include anyone that you’ve ever heard of, it’s not the very best of places to start from.

They describe themselves as “Psychedelic / Rock / Grindcore”, but all I got was more Angle Grinder than ‘Grindcore’.

I guess it’s yet another one of those genre pidgeonholes that people make up when they’re trying desperatley not to get themselves put into any other pidgeonholes.

Anyway – what about the music?

The first track, ‘Peanut City’ comes right out of nowhere, shows immense promise and really rips along – but it sort of wanders around after the first few bars, not exactly going anywhere new.

The overall feel of the track is ‘confusing’ – I say that because it just becomes a bit of a hash of different time signatures which, unless done perfectly, just sound like poor timing and a desperate attempt to make the music more intersting than it actually is.   Don’t get me wrong, there’s some great riff ideas in there – but it seriously sounds like they picked about half a dozen of their favourite practice jam tunes and then just threw them together, with no real thought about how the overall track suffers as a result – which is quite badly, in all honesty…..

‘Pete Around the Bush’ is the other track sent for review.

Now, we’ve all played in bands where we’ve downtuned guitars for songs, whether that’s for a vocal pitching issue, to make a particular guitar part less difficult, or just because we wanted to – but I always got the idea that everyone tuned down to the same key?   Seems that the guys forgot this – and we’ve got a whole bunch of guitars all doing their individual thing as the start to this song.

It kind of settles down for the dominant riff, but there’s either some tuning issues or a lack of understanding of harmonies going on pretty much throughout the whole song, making what could have been a decent enough tune sound ‘wrong’.

Now – live, it might be a different matter, but when you’re listening to a recording, it’s easy to be more picky – and on the strength of two tracks, it’s hard to get a feel as to whether this tuning is a deliberate thing or not.   Again, we have the overly complicated time signature changes which don’t really add any relevance to anything and show up even the slightest timing issues.

OK – overall, this isn’t the worst thing I’ve ever heard – but neither is it the best example of this music I’ve ever listened to.

The vocals, whilst trying hard to emulate Joe Alselmo in the shouting stakes, don’t do anything other than that – and when the guitars are doing their weird ‘off-key’ thing in the background, it makes the shouting even less appealing. AT least with Pantera, there were some far more tuneful moments that made the contrast between the two forms hit off each other and ‘work’.

The musicianship from the rest of the band is OK – not the tightest, but a lot of that is only really highlighted by the mish-mash of time signatures in each song and will only improve with time.

My advice would be to rip that first song to shreds and take the dozen or so promising ideas and make them individual tracks.

Calm down with the 23/57 time signatures that change every couple of bars, as even headbanging needs a rhythm to go along to, try to mix up those vocals and make sure you REALLY listen to how the guitars interact with each other and with the vocals………

Keef