Needing weeding
In their latest interview uploaded to Epitaph Records' YouTube channel, brothers Fletcher and Wyatt Shears sit in a blacked-out studio setting amongst cartoon style trash cans answering questions from a goblin. The ten-minute video recalls the sort of graphic art one would find on a teenager boy’s myspace page in the late 2000s.
The Garden are a fashionable band, this is nothing new, and the visuals that have accompanied their latest album demonstrate how the once male-models are still on the retrospective hunt to find visual styles that haven’t yet been trendified. Latest LP Kiss My Super Bowl Ring sees The Garden doing the same thing musically, ranging all the way from punk to breakbeat, experimenting further than they ever have with style to update a fusion unique to them. By embracing their inner teenage brat to guide us through the rocky 11 track path, the album feels like an exercise in attitude.
The twins have created their most sonically chaotic album to date, serious themes haven’t been left out though. The opening track 'Clench To Stay Awake' is a song about the duo's tendency to faint often, but the lyrics put a more monotonous and painful spin on the subject:
“Here comes another day
Where I clench to stay awake
Here comes another day
Where trauma becomes my fate”
The following song ‘A Struggle’ is perhaps the most archetypal song on the album, shifting energies and styles when they want their lyrics to be considered in a different emotional light. The song also demonstrates the band’s self-assuredness
"If you think
For a second now
I'll shift my gears
Then you're dead wrong"
this confidence within oneself is a running theme through The Garden’s ouvre, and very well summed up in the title track. The meaning of the album’s title to the band is basically representative of a "way of living" and an "attitude more than anything". I think it would be safe to assume that this attitude is a more aggressive version of their other saying "vada-vada" which was also supposed to be an attitude of knowing who you are and feeling free to express what however you like.
The attitude of ‘Kiss My Super Bowl Ring’ is well developed through the album, but it is not always enough to keep the album enjoyable. It seems that the boundary-less attitude of expression they have adopted Is sometimes too fleeting and not fleshed out enough to create a solid and consistently enjoyable listening experience.
- 6.0 -
decent
highlights:
'A Struggle', 'Kiss My Super Bowl Ring', 'AMPM Truck'
Daniel Peoples is a 3rd year film studies student at King's College, London. He prefers to spend his time watching films, listening to music and writing incredibly insightful reviews for all his loyal fans.
Thanks for reading! Slow Motion Panic Masters is a music, arts and culture blog created and edited by Ben Wheadon, a literature student and musician based in London, England.
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