Chimpomatic

Cut City

Exit Decades

Gold Standard Labora

Many people may have come across this record while searching the web for any news of Interpol's next move. Whether intentionally or not, Sweden's Cut City had their debut leaked under the name Interpol - Mammoth and the clever thing about this genius piece of marketing and internet manipulation is that once you've downloaded this it would probably take the average casual Interpol fan a few plays to realise that it isn't the New York wonder boys after all, but a band who sound exactly like them in nearly every way. This overwhelming similarity would normally turn me right off but the cunning strategy and the fact that it's a pretty good listen have endeared this beautiful pastiche to my ears.

With heavy drums, chiming guitars and Max J Hansson's monotone vocals songs like opener Like Ashes and Anticipation have all the driving force and deep penetration of the myriad of influences that present themselves with every note. You can't help thinking through albums like this how similar the whole retro music trend is to chinese whispers. Interpol were clearly influenced by Joy Division and while Cut City give more than just a passing nod to the Factory trailblazers it's Interpol from whom most of their sound has developed. So somewhere along this chain of inspiration the sound is diluted. Intepol's Paul Banks  is no where near as intense a vocalist as Ian Curtis and here we see Hansson to be a diluted version of Banks.

But if the forthcoming Interpol album sucks, and now that the new Editors album does suck, Exit Decades will more than fill the gap in your Joy Divisionesq, barritone post-punk slot and no record collection is complete these days without such a slot.


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#Music

19th Jun 2007 - Tumblr

2.5

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