TV Priest - Uppers (Album review)
Take the albums opening track The Big Curve, it kicks the
album off sounding fresh and agitated but the verses on this track feel hollow.
The songs atmosphere is created mainly via clunky over the top guitars which
kind of overpower the rest of the music. I do have to admit things come
together a lot better on the chorus and the song itself isn’t awful, but when
this is the album opener it just screams this band aren’t distinguishing their
own sound and instead just following others.
Press Gang takes a while to get going and when it does it
hits with this krautrock sounding repetitive riff. The song is kind of dull and
flat and there isn’t really much on the song that impresses me other than I
guess a solid vocal. It isn’t very inventive as a track and I think that’s
where is suffers.
Things do improve on the albums third track, Leg Room. I
enjoy this song a lot, the dynamics at the start of the track are well done and
the song builds up with these intrusive distorted blasts of sound. Another
solid vocal performance here and well an when the song does kick in its
powerful and aggressive. Lyrically this song is good as well, on most of the
album I find the lyrics to be a little gimmicky but on this track they come
across as genuinely witty, especially the lyric about James Corden’s Carpool
Karaoke which is genuinely funny.
History Week is an interesting change up; things are slowed
down completely here. This is more an ambient track than anything else with any
instrumentation on the track sitting very quietly in the mix. The song is
soothing and introspective, sounding more like a film score than anything else.
Whilst I don’t love this song I do really admire the band for putting a track
like this on the album.
The band then falls back on the clunky guitars sitting below
quirky vocals on Decoration. This song more than anything reminds me how much I
hate the new wave of punk vocalists that IDLES seem to have inspired, where
they sing about random things that sound witty and tongue in cheek for a cheap
laugh. It’s a style that I think is already dated and has aged extremely
poorly. But back in regards to Decoration, again it feels like the skeleton of
an interesting song and if the band pushed themselves more they could have done
something cool with this one I guess.
Powers of Ten is one of the better tracks on Uppers; it
kicks off with an intruding repetitive guitar and vocals that are delivered
calmly for a change. I like how the background noise slowly increases in volume
and forms this drenching drone sound that engulfs the track.
The album ends with the song Saintless; a song quite a bit
longer than the rest of the track list. Saintless begins on a more reserved
note and gradually builds up, this song again has a slight krautrock influence
again which is something I have noticed a couple of times across the album. The
feedback from the guitar sits well on this song and even though the song itself
is quite predictable, it’s certainly an interesting way to end the album.
For me the biggest issue with Uppers is that it is too one
note. There are a few more creative tracks that do mix up the album a bit but
the band are then far too quick to fall back on the same underwhelming formula
to fill up the track list. Even the better songs on this album aren’t that
good, whilst there is some obvious musical talent in TV Priest they really need
to do more to define themselves in an already bloated pool of similar bands. I
don’t think it really helps the band either that they have jumped on the
bandwagon this late; if this album had dropped 5 years ago I would have
probably been more impressed but at this point nothing they’re doing is new. I
do think there is potential here though and the band could go on to write some
decent music later in their career but for now I’m not sold on TV Priest.
45/100
Best tracks – Leg Room, Slide Show, Powers of Ten
Worst tracks – Press Gang, Decoration, Fathers and Sons
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