I didn’t realise that people made music like this anymore. I’m rather glad that they do. As Low Five kicks this album off, its blend of indie cool and alt-rock swagger, measured melody and near-metal muscle, infectious riffs and heavy hooks tell me that there is hope for rock and roll yet. Of late, I have looked out of the window above the writing desk in my ivory tower and despaired. Rock music seems to have become a cliche, metal a battle of sub-genres – post-this, that-core, nu-whatever – and indie and alt-rock seemed too busy looking at themselves in the mirror admiring their designer labels and complicated hairstyles that they had forgotten the job at hand.
I Forget Myself is here to save the day, blending together in various amounts the different elements that go into more discerning music, sometimes veering more towards one than another but always tempering the heavy with the heartfelt, the groovesome with the graceful, the powerful with the pop-aware. And always delivering the result through a foot-on-the-monitor, fist-in-the-air, low-slung, anthemic and accessible blast of music.
Tracks such as Along The Way merge staccato, classic rock guitar riffs with more restrained dynamics, changing pace to keep things interesting and knowing just when to floor the pedal and just when to ease off the gas whilst I’m Just Acting Out pushes on through into more metal melodics and The Symmetry of What Once Was shakes up the indie template and injects the missing…what’s the word I’m looking for….oh, yes, Balls!
There’s Hope Yet is bruised and brooding, not quite getting to the theatre-land cliches that gothic music has become, thankfully, but reminding us that there is as much beauty in the dark as there is in the light, the result a shaded and shimmering beast of a song that really kicks some arse but does so in very creative ways.
Here’s To You is the obvious single, taking a sort of pop-punk vibe and rewriting it for an audience that has moved beyond the usual frat boy toilet humour and the emo victimisation which has always made me wary, and indeed weary, of that scene. Where was this song thirty years ago when we really needed it?
The album ends on perhaps the most surprising track, a blend of slow and heavy riffs, meandering basslines, lulling interludes and acoustic cascades, a final reminder of just how un-pigeon-hole-able (I think that is a word) I Forget Myself really is.
Not only an album as great as it was unexpected but exactly what I needed to hear to restore my faith in certain quarters of the modern musical landscape.
Buy. This. Now!
