There are 2 bands from the U.S. called ‘Fashion Week’, one plays lame indie bollox, and the other one sounds like they may want to kill you. …Thankfully, it’s the latter band that concerns us here. I say thankfully, to be honest this CD represents somewhat of a disappointment. I mean… I know that ‘Fashion Week’ is a crap name for a band…and yes, their Nirvana-spoofing biog is quite childish, but with just 29 minutes of music, surely I’m in for a killer ride. …well kind of…
Things get off to a good start with ‘Fendi Bender’. An opening squeal of feedback, and we’re into the kind of grooves of later-day Therapy?, the grunge influence becomes apparent when the vocals start, and then things get more vicious. A quick soundbite and a great stop-start riff lets ‘Chorusace’ continue the noisy onslaught. The guitar leads make this track very effective, and it’s quite clear that singer/guitarist Josh Lozano has attended the Anaal Nathrakh school of vocal etiquette. ‘Meek Is Miznabble’ rambles in at a faster pace, before it settles into a nice and sludgy breakdown. Unfortunately, this is where we get a hint of things to come as vocally things start to get a little, erm…Emo. We get back on track with ‘Summer Line’, and after a slow and shimmering intro the grunge influence rears its head again with a great Alice In Chains-style riff, and here, the vocals sound desperate and convincing. Then things start to go a little wrong… ‘Fur Free Friday’ may have the kind of urgent chorus riff that served Placebo very well in the early days, but this is dodgy metalcore territory… Next… ‘Klosstrophobia’ is a piano-led dirge that seems to go on forever, it also contains the lyrics “I’m so glad I never met you / I’m so glad that we’re not friends / You’ve got yours, you can have mine / I hope we never make amends”. …Next… ‘Fashion=-s/(\$)/collapse/GSO’ is 3 minutes of pointless news channel, television drone. You may as well skip it. The final track is called ‘Haute Topic’ (geddit?) which presents us with a nice and grating outro, but you may not get that far, as the rest of it features that irritating duel vocal crap that makes up 90% of Scuzz.
So it’s a shame really, as ‘Pret-a-Porter’ is not a bad release, in fact some of it is very, very good. But it does have a split personality. And I much prefer the nastier side.
(5/10 Stuart Carroll)
Leave a Reply