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All the Saints, "Fire on Corridor X"
With their debut album following up the wildly successful A Place to Bury Strangers self-titled on Killer Pimp, All the Saints have a rather large pair of shoes to fill here. This trio travels on similar roads as the their label mates, but with a different stylistic approach. The love of noise and psychedelic feedback is here, but somewhat tempered by a slightly less aggressive, more accessible sound that is no less enjoyable and shows the same attention to "songs" as opposed to just "noise."
The disc is bookended by the brief instrumentals "Shadow, Shadow" and "Mil Mil," both channel Nico-era Velvet Underground with their slow, fuzzed out guitar and soft organ passages. For the most part, these end up the most subdued minutes on the album, as the segue into the thick and heavy vibrato guitar of "Sheffield" that manages to be completely loud, but not muddled, sitting nicely in a clear mix. There is a definite feel of 1990s alt rock influence, but rather than falling into a rut of rose-tinted tribute band nostalgia, it instead is more than happy to blow out into loud, noisy passages that would have been too much for most of those more conventional grunge era folks.
The linkages to APTBS will surely be played up by others in various media outlets, but while the former were more likely to prefer the noisy walls of distortion like My Bloody Valentine, All the Saints set their shoegaze sights more towards Spacemen 3 and Loop, relying more on the repetitive elements that, while by far not easy listening, are definitely less abrasive. "Hornett" and "Outs" both ape Sonic Boom and J. Spaceman's penchant for opium den hazy distortion, but have no problem throwing that out the window to add on a bit of 1990s grunge metal riffing that somehow works, despite how it sounds on paper. It's not quite Spiritualized meets Soundgarden (Soundalized?) but not completely off the mark either.
Being that these guys are coming up from Alabama by way of Atlanta, the almost REM vocal arrangements of "Farmacia" could be entirely a product of geographic osmosis, but the combination of lead and backing vocal arrangements honestly give me that sort of vibe, even if the rest of the music is much more thrashing than anything on Reckoning. The almost new wave feeling of "Papering Fix" gives a similar sensation as well, but without any specific reference point one can draw other than just the ambiance.
On their debut, this trio takes that 1980s-90s nostalgia that has been on the upswing in recent months, but like APTBS and bands of a similar ilk they are nostalgic, without being unoriginal or resembling a bad bar mitzvah cover band, wearing their influences on their sleeves and breaking new ground in the process. They can balance that love of pure dissonance and distortion yet still make a song that isn't afraid to be catchy and memorable.
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