The need for constant reinvention in modern music is something that is really starting to grate on me. Not every band can be like Radiohead and almost self-consciously seek to give themselves a new sound and image with every other album. Some bands simply try to do something different, take some risks and see if it works; the best example of this in the current UK music scene would arguably be The Horrors, who now sound absolutely nothing like how they started out. By all means, if it works, go for it, but at the same time, don’t try too hard.
Then there are bands who try and push themselves forward a little bit at a time. In my opinion, this is the better course of action, and it is this modus operandi that General Fiasco (facebook/twitter) have gone for. The Northern Irish group’s debut album Buildings was one of the most confident and assured debuts to emerge from the scene there in a good few years, and that’s saying something. Lyrics that were often despondent and, in some cases, deeply affecting, were anchored to jubilant hooks and raucous riffs. Even back then, the then-trio were a pop band… but my god, it turns out they were only just getting warmed up.
This may seem an odd thing to say about a band who formed in 2006 and took the guts of four years to release their debut (leaving lots of fantastic songs in demo form – the phrase ‘embarrassment of riches’ doesn’t quite sum it up), but in the year and a half since Buildings surfaced, two important things have happened: firstly, the band have recruited a second guitarist (ex-Panama Kings member Stuart Bell), and this has done wonders for their sound; and secondly, if you thought they were a pop band back then, well, you’re in for surprise – they have embraced instantaneous indie-pop and written what is perhaps their best material to date.
The EP was trailed back in August by The Age That You Start Losing Friends, the second song on Waves, and it could be seen to be about the eighteen or so months that elapsed since we last heard from the band. It remains important for the band not to forget their old friends, but nonetheless Owen Strathern poses the question, directed as much at himself and his bandmates as anyone else, ‘Have we really changed that much to fall so far out of touch?’ The idea of staying true to one’s roots is something that informs this EP, also turning up in the title track’s chorus, contrasting with the idea of moving on to pastures new: ‘I go back like a wave to the shore / I don’t think about you much now anymore / When I said that I wouldn’t go – I’m a wave and I’ll never stay.’
The title track is perhaps the most immediate thing the band have written over the course of their five-year career, and its post-chorus riff might just be the most euphoric moment in the band’s catalogue so far. However, for all its pop sensibility, it doesn’t contain the best hook; that prize goes to the EP’s closer I Wanna Eat Her, an anthemic song that’s driven by Strathern’s confident bassline and Stephen Leacock’s drumming, the latter of which is also a feature of German Roads.
If I wanted to be picky, I would say that German Roads is the weakest song on the EP – it loses out a bit with The Age… and I Wanna Eat Her either side of it – but there really isn’t much to fault Waves for. It’s eleven-and-a-half minutes of a band truly coming into their own. There is a steady stream of material planned for next year: a second EP will follow in the spring, and then the anticipated second album will be out by July at the latest. That’s the plan at least. If this EP is a marker of the quality of the material being saved for 2012, then it could well be General Fiasco’s year.
Waves was released on November 14th by Dirty Hit
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State.ie are streaming the EP.
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