Robyn Writes

Crash Doubt Festival – The Showroom Lincoln, 2/6/12 [pt 1]

After a very successful first year, Crash Doubt returned to the deepest and darkest depths of the North (well… at least on the very rainy Sunday) for another go. Hosted in The Showroom in Lincoln, the punk and hardcore fest was a beautiful interruption to the Jubilee weekend.

Before I get into the bands, I have to stress how well organised the whole weekend was. Bands rarely overran or came on late, the stages were laid out well, the merchandise section was fantastically managed and the bar wasn’t too overpriced. The venue, a conference centre combined with a youth centre, was a great space to host in. If only half of the festival-goers spent more time in the venue checking out the bands than out in the car park.

Saturday started out strong. We got to the venue just in time for Climates (3.5/5), whose particular variety of melodic hardcore was good fun. The vocalist, who looked a little bit like Parkway Drive’s Winston McCall, had a great tone to his voice and the band as a whole sounded brilliant for one of the first on. Following them up on the Time Will Tell stage were Fair Do’s (3/5), a local Lincoln pop-punk band. Tinged with posicore, they were fun and bouncy but they wore all their influences on their sleeves. Nevertheless, with their sense of fun and a little more development, they should be going places. Up on the Punktastic stage, Tim Van Tol (3.5/5) regaled us all with his solo folk punk. Reminiscent of sea shanties at times, some gruff and soulful acoustic fare did everyone some good (and Kitteh thought he looked a bit like Varg from Burzum).

Watch Commander (2/5) were fairly boring melodic punk rock – their songs had promise but failed to hit the mark. However, Attack! Vipers! (5/5) were nothing short of incredible. One of the most impressive hardcore bands coming out of the UK right now, their performance was intense, exciting and completely involving. If Attack! Vipers! play near you, don’t ever miss them. Moral Dilemma (2.5/5) weren’t really to my taste – abrasive punk rock that sounded all the same. It’s difficult to write good punk in the old style these days and while their overall performance was reasonably solid, I still found their set dull. Bangers (4/5) are proof that musical evolution often wins out and their gruff punk anthems rang out loud and clear on the Punktastic stage. There were awesome singalongs, sweet hooks and some actually very cleverly written instrumental sections. You can still be a musician in a punk band; Bangers will show you how.

Back downstairs on the Big Cheese stage, The Smoking Hearts (4/5), along with a guy who was either so wasted or on some variety of pills, showed us all how to party. Admittedly, they played fairly standard hardcore stuff – nothing new, but it was tight and they were batshit insane. Lots of jumping, some rolling around and potentially broken elbows – that’s how it should be done. Demoraliser (1/5) clearly didn’t observe how The Smoking Hearts did it and were truly the first of a few identikit hardcore bands we managed to stumble upon. They may have been local heroes but their breakdowns were so subpar, the vocals had no tone to them whatsoever and they sounded like a Terror ripoff without any of the brutality. Hang The Bastard (4/5) are how you should do hardcore, in comparison – terrifyingly. There are no other words. And yet the man in the khaki balaclava wasn’t the most intimidating thing all weekend. That accolade belongs to Woody from POLAR (4.5/5). While POLAR’s set was impressive, it was distracting to see a guy who looks like he has rabies push a crowd around because “if [you] don’t move, [I’ll] fucking move you”. Highly counter-productive to crowd involvement, but nonetheless, a stellar performance from one of the UK’s most exciting new bands. Heights (3.5/5) struggled to follow suit but their crowd involvement was certainly better. Their sound was less intense and more dirgey – the doom influences in their music rang loud and clear but still remained full of desperation.

And we finished off the night with No Trigger (3/5). I’ve been waiting to see No Trigger for a while, ever since I was bowled over by Canyoneer. To this day, it’s one of my favourite records. But I found No Trigger to be a bit… well, flat. There was plenty of enthusiasm but it just felt like there was something lacking. Might have been a levels thing, might have been an end of tour fatigue, but it just didn’t ring true. It didn’t end my night on a total downer though because they played Owner Operator and that put a fairly big smile on my face.

So, Saturday was pretty damn sweet. Sunday’s writeup to follow!

Three more days.

Three more days and then my final year exams are over.

To put it pretty bluntly, that’s exactly why the site has been so slow at updating the past month and a bit and why I haven’t put anything online in the past two weeks. It’s been crunch time as me and literally all my writers/people who want to be involved in the website haven’t been able to contribute anything lately. I tried my damned hardest at the beginning of this term to keep updating once a week but these have been the most important exams of my LIFE. And the last exams that I will likely ever have to take.

Once those final exams are over, Kitteh and I are going to be raiding Crash Doubt Festival and we’ll be bringing you as much coverage as we can get away with. In the interim period, we’re going to be getting through our list of reviews. So to the PR companies/record labels, we’re deeply sorry and we appreciate your patience. To the bands that send us in their stuff, we’re even more sorry. But once Tuesday 29th May is done, then TBO is back online and we will not or cannot be stopped.

At the heart of it all, we’re just a bunch of kids that really like alternative music and we physically can’t shut up about it. So don’t worry – TBO will certainly be back with a vengeance.

Love you all,
xoxo – Ripper

Underwater Tiger – Where Miles Become Meaning

Underwater Tiger hail from upstate New York. Where Miles Become Meaning is their debut album, yet the band have been building up hype well before this release and managed to accrue a cool $5000 towards the album production thanks to a fast growing fanbase. Luckily for them, Where Miles Become Meaning is a great start for the band.

Immediately, I was swept away by the opening title track. Where Miles Become Meaning is a song with conviction and is already a fantastic display of the talent on board, beginning to showcase the great vocal dynamic going on within the band. All the band make a decent vocal contribution and the different voices coming through, intertwining with each other, sounds incredible. The introduction of a children’s choir at the end creates a powerful opener and a song that is presumably very hard to top.

While the title track is indeed a tour-de-force of emotion, the rest of the album doesn’t exactly pale in comparison. Underwater Tiger are clearly gifted songwriters and some amazing sweeping guitar can be found all across the album, but in You’re So Surreal in particular. There’s beautiful piano threaded through the album as well – Shipwreck Love starts out as a typical piano ballad and ends up being an awesome guitar and synth driven ride. Dioscuri is a completely instrumental track where all of their craft comes to the forefront and proves that they don’t need vocals to showcase their talent at all.

Although all the songs on the album are put together well, the album does start to get a little too familiar in the middle. It may be inevitable with this type of music, but songs start to blend together and fade into the background. There are exceptions and towards the end of the record everything starts to pick back up again, but that kind of soft, melodic OC-affair song starts to become a staple midway through. The band are at their best when they start to take some risks, like in Where Miles Become Meaning, Dioscuri and Treading Days, which has some great hardcore influences coming through. There is nothing particularly bad about the album (bar a few cringey lyrics about sex coming through) and in some ways, that familiarity is nice – the album is perfectly reminiscent of the early 2000s alternative scene – but Underwater Tiger really are most impressive when they start to explore.

Where Miles Become Meaning is a good, solid debut album. Made for lazy summer days, this album’s coming out just in time and is a great sign of things to come.

3.5 out of 5 high fives!

What is TBO up to at the moment? AKA revision hell

You’ve probably noticed that updates have been even slower than usual. And for that, we’re really sorry. Right now, Kitteh and I are in the final year of our undergraduate degree and right now, we have exams to prepare for and dissertations to finish. We’re trying to update once a week (maybe with a little leeway either side – might be once every two weeks but with more stuff than usual) with reviews and spotlight features until our exams are over and we can start putting a lot more effort into the site.

We have pretty much a whole month free in June so if you’re a band based in the West Midlands and would like us to interview you, then get in touch! All the contact details are up on the ‘contact me’ page, or you can Facebook us – the link to that is just to the right.

Thank you for your patience and thank you for checking us out in the first place. This started as just a fun little project between friends and now it’s so much bigger than that. Can you believe we’re almost four years old?!

xoxo – Ripper

Good Friend [EP]


Good Friend are the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Under Stars And Gutters, a great Northern Irish punk band. As sad as I was about USAG’s breakup, having discovered and fallen in love with them when they were on tour with The Lawrence Arms a few years back, the new EP from Good Friend is an absolute cracker and a fantastic sign of things to come.

From the opening chords of Dance On, Graves, you know that something special is about to happen. From a fast-paced melody rammed intro, the song breaks into the first verse and some excellently gruff vocals. While we’re not in Chuck Ragan realms of gruffness, the vocals are rightly self-assured and ready to kick ass, fitting just perfectly with the tone of the EP. There are some powerful gang vocals scattered throughout the EP and Good Friend use the punk rock staple well. Dance On, Graves has one of the best written choruses of this year without question and will be in your head for days. And we’re still on the first track here. The colourfully named Oh Fuck Off, Crazy Kev! is a two minute tirade about apathy and homesickness that definitely wouldn’t be out of place on a Larry Arms album, except it’s got a killer key change at the end that completely changes the game. Hospital Walls rounds off the EP just perfectly with yet another knockout chorus. At just under seven minutes, it’s three tracks of pure incendiary perfection; punk rock with a real sense of melody and emotion that so many bands strive for and just fall short of.

Good Friend are writing the punk rock anthems our generation sorely needs. While we’re seeing a great show of bands from across the ocean, Good Friend are one of the best things to come out of Ireland right now. Go and pick the EP up from their Bandcamp today so that they can make more incredible music.

5 out of 5 high fives!