Another week, another bunch of Joy Division wannabes. This week’s effort comes from LA’s She Wants Revenge. They join mainstays Interpol and Editors in the already swollen glut of goth-punk broodings for the modern age. As anyone who has heard this lot will tell you, it is, of course, Interpol that they most resemble. Absurdly so. Spare the lack of Interpol’s knack for melodies and some added dancey drum machine beats, there’s little to distinguish the two. It unfortunately renders SWR’s efforts quite redundant.
In other complaints, the aforementioned tunelessness adds to the cardinal sin of sounding samey. The juvenile lyrics are pretty embarrassing, they thank MySpace in their sleevenotes and the CD artwork is just plain awful. None of this should matter of course, if only they didn’t appear so much like a band moulded around marketing injunctions.
The parallels are not just subjective opinion: here’s the science bit. Last.fm applies mathematical wizardry to the listening habits of music fans worldwide. And its SWR page clearly lists Interpol and Editors high up under ‘Similar Artists’. And the most cutting-edge of police voice recognition equipment would have a tough task distinguishing Interpol’s Paul Banks and SWR’s Justin Warfield. (Interesting fact: Warfield is also a renowned hip hop artist and was the rapper on Bomb the Bass’s very excellent ‘Bug Powder Dust’). Similarly, the tune to ‘These Things’ would trick an unsuspecting Shazam into returning a confident ‘SHAZAM tagged INTERPOL: ‘Evil’.’
The duo clearly prefer to allude to the originals themselves. Song titles like ‘Tear You Apart’ and ‘Out of Control’ (see Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘She’s Lost Control’) strain to channel Ian Curtis’s spirit from beyond the grave.
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