Categories : Music Reviews, Rock + Pop.
 |
Rating: 3 / 5 Reviewer: Garth Paulson |
Spiral Beach is a fun band. Their songs are mostly upbeat and danceable. Their hooks are big, obvious and plentiful. Their songwriting robust enough to offer variation, but constrained enough that each of their songs is very clearly a Spiral Beach song.
Their latest album The Only Really Thing, is unsurprisingly a lot of fun. It crackles with energy and the band’s garage rock/beach punk/electro/horror movie dance soundtrack has a lot of mileage. There’s really not a lot to pick apart, as each song accomplishes what it sets out to do, be it the cemetery creep of ‘Raising The Snake,’ the rockabilly rave of ‘Battery’ or the cocky strut of ‘Way Way Out.’ While each song works on its own, taken as a whole The Only Really Thing ends up sounding an awful lot like the album that preceded it, 2007’s Ball. The Only Really Thing is just like Ball, only more so.
The question then, is whether this is a bad thing. Does it really matter that Spiral Beach haven’t grown much when their songs are still good? It’s not as if there’s a plethora of bands out their that strike the same balance Spiral Beach aim for and repeatedly hit – and shouldn’t the fact that they succeed be the important thing? Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the band could be doing more; that they could do something greater than releasing a collection of catchy songs that are forgotten immediately after they finish every couple years. Ah, fuck it. The Only Really Thing is a lot of fun and that’s good enough for now.
