aaamusic | On 04, Mar 2012

Someone’s eaten all the sherbert and then the crayons, and has started to puke up glittery, fizzing day-glo pop music. I mean this as a compliment, by the way. Swound! are the kind of band that require an exclamation mark, with a lurid technicolour pop-punk sound that bursts out the speakers with massive guitars and gang vocals.

 

‘You Kids Are Gonna Love It’ will never win a Nobel Prize, but it’s the kind of ridiculous blend of obnoxious silliness and gleeful energy that wins over even the stoniest of hearts and minds. ‘Tokyo’ shares the jaunty up-yours attitude, with a familiar but incredibly enjoyable bassline. The chorus is like a hyperactive Motion City Soundtrack, with the busy guitars and upbeat sound matched by gentle and enjoyable nihilism. Elsewhere, ‘In My Head’ throws a heavy slacker pop sound that wouldn’t go amiss sharing a bill with Dinosaur Pile Up in the near future, with the same whimsical take on grunge’s dark sound, mixing it up with a kids’ TV theme style synth break, and the lyric “this is the ballad we never wanted” has my vote.

I suppose ‘Everybody Hates Her’ should be a song I dislike, but the sheer silliness of it manages to excuse its laziness. Not many other bands would write a vibrantly angsty song about disliking a book shop employee. This lighthearted take on frustration is equally present on the danceable stomp of ‘If Only I Could’. The song could easily sit on the mainstream charts of anywhere, but with a twist of the Wildhearts’ ‘TV Tan’ in its lyrics and its underlying moodiness. The Wildhearts-isms rise further in ‘Oh No!’. It’s not copying them by a long shot, although the pop hooks and heavy riffs hold a slight similarity. The general combination of high-octane songwriting and snotty attitude are where it lies. Ditto with ‘Ghosts’, as its slinking, stomping riff/drums interplay slithers into the ears of the listener before bursting into a massive chorus that could have been written by Ash back in the earlier days. Ash could probably have written ‘When The Spaceship Lands’ and ‘Physics Makes Us Strong’, and I would be very surprised if the aforementioned pop-punk luminaries wouldn’t be regularly finding their way onto the band stereo. The synths set them apart from a copyist band, but the lyrics and riffs are the obvious child of Ash’s Intergalactic Sonic 7”s. The latter track of the two is a great and bouncy drumkit and bassline-driven moshpit grin that you could bounce to in any live setting, the jangling guitars and catchy chorus just putting icing on the cake.

Speaking of icing on the cake… ‘Mean People Suck’ genuinely cracked me up with its juvenile and ridiculously enjoyable lyrics and folksy/nursery rhyme tune.

 

The one issue that stops Swound! from being the unexpected winners of the week is that at twelve songs long, ‘Into The Sea’ does start to outstay its welcome. They’re a really enjoyable band yes, but after seven songs it gets a little repetitive. That said, I’d quite happily have this knocking around on my hypothetical iPod, as any one of the tracks on here is an instant mood-lifter. If you like Dinosaur Pile Up, I can almost guarantee you a good hour of fun here.