Shuriken

This Lincolnshire U.K. foursome really caught my attention with this enhanced 6 song CDEP. Not that there’s something groundbreaking or new going on here, but besides bearing a lot of today's generic, early Saves The Day sound, they manage to throw in a good amount of post-punk punches to keep my attention. The high vocals here sound a lot like their U.S.-colleagues in the indie-emo and pop-punk category. And if I’d read a review that mentioned there’s a superfluous acoustic track on top, I normally would add this on top of the pile of releases that I have nothing new to tell about. But, as I mentioned, there’s something more about this band which tickles my senses, and it has to be the nice breakdowns and melodic outbursts that come around abundant in these songs.

Although you sometimes get the impression they intend to sound like a Midtown or Fall Out Boy double, they mix in a more post-hardcore sound with a lot of guitar breakdowns in high and low tunes, and they do that at the right time, without losing too much of the fluency in their songs. “The 18th Emergency” is a good opener, although I guess they chose the easiest to swallow song as their first, yet it has some great guitar-dueling somewhere in the middle and a background screeching second voice at times. The enhanced portion of this disc has a video clip and a funny making-of for this song. The best exploit on this album for me however is without a doubt “Super Pursuit,” where the energy is most notable, while there’s still parts that show the smoother melodies. The also enjoyable “Intangible” reminded me of recent H2O, that band with its hardcore roots now fading away into more accessible sounds. I’ll forgive them their acoustic dullness, for not putting it last spot on the EP. In fact, it's not that bad really, but they should leave that for a band like the Get Up Kids. They’re much better in mixing these emotions with crunchy guitars like they do well in “No Ammunition” again: although having a cheesy guitar at the start and in the “interludiums” of the song, they get that song into some good moves as it progresses into a nice galloping thing, while towards the end it sounds a lot tougher again.

I think you’ll like this if you think any of aforementioned bands have something good in them, because they picked the assets of them and blended them into a nice fluent album with powerful songs that still have some of the pop-rock. Try it.