aaamusic | On 04, Mar 2012

Maybe I’m in the wrong business. Sometimes it truly hurts me to be cruel about a band that I can see have potential, and this is one of those times. Straight Lines are yet another post-hardcore act from the valleys (Pontypridd to be exact), signed to Xtra Mile Records, home of Frank Turner and The Xcerts and for most part a pretty sizeable stamp of quality and are just about to release their second album Freaks Like Us.  After generating some pretty sizeable buzz with their leek flavoured Coheed and Cambria impressions, comeback single Half Gone seems to have taken that sound and somehow… Young Guns-ified it. Everything seems precision tooled to melt out of daytime radio like butter on toast without much of an edgy or exciting moment between the almost polite drums of the intro and the hackneyed, half time ending. Is it bad? Not exactly, there’s enough energy and distorted guitars to satisfy anyone with a hankering for them but there’s very little here that hasn’t been done better by many, many other bands from Wales, let alone from the British rock scene as a whole. But truth be told, the fact that Straight Lines exist is a heartening thing that makes a mockery of the whole “Rock is dead” squawking that comes along every four years or so, it’s just I can’t get behind this the way I can get behind the likes of Exit_International, Cold In Berlin or Enter Shikari.

 

Will Howard