I keep telling myself I really shouldn’t like this album. It’s just dumb punk all played at the same speed and yelling instead of singing and monotone guitars and…. And then I find myself enjoying it. Every time I begin to think maybe it’s not for me, something quirky comes along – a rhythm change, a keyboard line, a surrealistically catchy lyric, and I’m drawn back in.
Album opener, ‘Pass the Hat Around,’ is a killer. Guitar feedback squeals introduce boy-girl vocal interplay over a wall of noise and a tempo much slower than most of the rest of the album. It harks back to the British shoegazer heyday of the early ’90s. It is noticeably different from the rest of the album, but doesn’t sound out of place, and certainly raises expectations. From here the punk rhythms kick in. Thankfully, though, this is not the po-faced dirge music that punk has turned into, nor does it stray into scene-y electro-punk territory. It’s loose, fun punk with a political core. Imagine maybe Regurgitator or Gerling in their noisy up-tempo moments, with Southampton accents and you’re starting to get into the ballpark. The band is not afraid to pull in other influences such as the Doors-ish keyboards in ‘Kite Eating Tree’ or the sped up new wave of ‘Box of Delights’ and ‘All of the Stars’. Knowing more than three chords helps them maintain melodic interest across 12 tracks. Yes, there is lots of yelling but this doesn’t mask the catchiness of many of the songs, even when the subject matter throws a hard light on the ugly sides of contemporary culture. “It’s hard to breathe when you’re always wearing a mask”, they chant in an impressive rant on the state of feminism in the 21st century during ‘I Think the Record’s Stopped’, or “This buildings on fire/and we burn what we can’t carry away/who says it’s a culture of waste?” looking at western thinking in ‘Apes and Pigs at the Vulture Coliseum”.
Help She Can’t Swim have something to say, but ultimately it’s the sheer playfulness of the fun they are obviously having that translates into an enjoyable listening experience.
Adrian Elmer
