The Epidemic - I am Completely Operational
(Ache)
You’re standing on a cliff overlooking a beach, where children play and women tan. It’s sunny. Suddenly, from behind you, a voice whispers: “Radiohead meets the Promise Ring.” Do you jump?
But seriously, people, the Epidemic play like an emo-ized version of Radiohead. And, while this isn’t particularly terrible, it gives me a kind of queasy feeling. Radiohead and the Promise Ring? Corporate doom meets sunny heartbreak? What? That’s what it is, though, and the Epidemic (following the trend of violent band names that’s been springing up lately, like the Explosion and the Collisions) love it. Oh, do they ever.
The album starts off on a really promising note (no pun intended!), with the mellow, robotic "The West Coast as a Robot." This track brings to mind the best parts of Calla’s underrated Scavengers, with paranoid lyrics ("you don’t have to make a hospital bed/cut her dosage in half"), depressing samples, and mechanical clinking. Genius. Now, if it didn’t degenerate...
You can see what’s coming. The album maintains a pretty steady pace after that, nothing really recalling the brilliance of "West Coast" but nothing being really terrible, either. This is all destroyed with two back to back endless, droning (in a bad way) monstrosities. Seriously, I’m here, right now, to tell the Epidemic to sequence their records better. Firstly, don’t put the best track at the very beginning, and secondly, never, ever put two long tracks side by side on this kind of record! It just kills the entire flow.
Anyway, this is a half-decent computerized-emo record with a killer first track. These kinds of albums always slip through the cracks, with the emo-kids thinking it’s too experimental, and the p-rock kids (kids?) thinking it’s boring. I think the Epidemic is a band with a lot of potential and a debut album that suffers from a lack of sequencing. Forgettable.
|
