First offering from new Scottish indie band and the first thing you noticed is that the sound quality is superb, excellently recorded, played and produced. The band start with the title track and it's a stomper of a piece with one of the finest choruses around. The band has this huge depth of sound courtesy of sunth fills adding extra textures to the guitars and rhythm section. Unafraid to use dynamics to their best extent, the song surges forward for the verses, stomps its mark on the proceedings yet drops down to this gorgeous intensity for the hook, the vocalist providing a nasally and attention-grabbing presence as he flies through the verses, glides through the bridge-as hook and rises up on the choruses, the band storming ahead behind him with an arrangement that cascades and powers ahead on a song that improves with every play. It's commercial in a very serious way, a bit like Dundee's The Goodnights with 10,000 volts running through them. A solid gem of a song with a sumptuous arrangement.
“Turning”, however, starts with a lurching ska rhythm from the band as the song bounces forward, the vocalist stretches the verses and provides another sneer of a performance on the verses, which take off as they progress, adding multi-tracks for extra flavour and depth before the band revert to the slice of indie-ska that's captured your attention and kept you hooked. Back and forth it goes and you can't help but get carried along in its intensity, lifting you up on the choruses and swaying you solidly but gently on the verses, with a final flurry of huge-sounding band-played and sung epic magic to see out this massive sounding track in all its glory.
“City Lockdown” drives forward right from the start with surging guitar lead and a football-chorus anthem as the synth swirls, the rhythm section rocks and the song itself becomes this towering mass of huge-sounding verses and football-chant hook that really gets under your skin, powers ahead in full force as the instrumental muscles are flexed and the strength is its passion. That hook really gets into your head, drives you mad, but that's the sign of a mega slice of stomping, storming, driving indie-pop.
Finally, we come to “That Way” which starts with an almost UB 40-esque vocal over lurching drums before the vocal becomes a bit more impassioned, the drums briefly give way to synth swirls as then the band crunch in and the multi-tracked vocals positively sail through this huge-sounding slice of guitars, synths, drums and bass on a track that is simply wondrous. Once again they do the trad verse-chorus-verse bit but what they do and how they do it, makes it work an absolute treat, the result being what I think is the finest song on the EP. There's depth, intensity, harmony, drive, crashing guitars, superb vocals, dramatic arrangements and a presence that is just enormous to hear and enormous to enjoy, a positive anthem that improves with every play and defies you not to sing along with it and get caught under its tight, cohesive and absolutely irresistible magic spell – a truly stunning track.
Overall – fantastic stuff – every track is a gem and it's surely got to get this band noticed as a potentially major player on the Scottish indie music scene.