Struggling For Reason

For What It's Worth EP

Written by: PP on 04/07/2012 23:29:28

The punk rock scene in Belgium is strong, no doubt due to Groezrock, which is why I welcome every release sent to us in the genre from the country with high hopes of its quality. Struggling For Reason is the latest band trying to break through with their third EP "For What It's Worth", which basically reflects their influences mostly from the Fat Wreck bands like The Lawrence Arms, Banner Pilot and stuff like that, resulting in a fairly standard and completely unsurprising version of the genre. You could probably argue that there's a decent amount of Authority Zero in their sound as well, and nobody would be bothered enough to present evidence of the contrary.

So what you get is typical power-chord based, fast punk rock with melodically ringing guitars. The positive news is that the production (or lack thereof) leaves the instruments nicely rough around their edges, but unfortunately at the cost of tightness. Many of the songs suffer from being inherently too loose, which dampens the melodies significantly. It's all very straight-forward as well, so the resulting expression feels a little bit anonymous as a whole. It's not that the band write bad songs per se, they merely fall blatantly within the average bracket in the genre, and hence they feel like that odd band on the Fat Wreck compilation that produced a good song or two over the years but never enough to convince you to check them out properly.

Download: Up Against The Wall
For the fans of: Banner Pilot, The Lawrence Arms, Authority Zero, Fat Wreck punk
Listen: Bandcamp

Release date 02.03.2012
You're Fired! Records

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.