Album Review :: Spectres - Dying

Spectres

Dying

February 21 2015 (Sonic Cathedral)

7/10

Words: Richard O’Hagan

On this debut album from Bristol's Spectres, they tread a path which too few bands have dared visit recently. With guitars very much to the fore and Joe Hatt’s hushed vocals, their sound is reminiscent of a more melodic A Place to Bury Strangers, or a less feedback-addicted Band of Susans.

The fact that you can’t really hear what Hatt is singing is not the problem you might expect it to be. With titles such as ‘This Purgatory’, ‘Where Flies Sleep’ and ‘Blood in the Cups’, it is pretty obvious that these are not songs about how much they enjoyed watching ‘Frozen’ on repeat over Christmas.

Standing out from the noise and chaos is ‘Sink’, which in its changes of volume and tempo is an eerie throwback to the late 1980s and House of Love at the their very best.
Entirely instrumental opener ‘Drag’ is not only a bold move (how many new bands would have the nerve to put an instrumental number at that point?) but in its undulating fuzz and clattering rimshots sounds almost industrial.

Unfortunately, one thing that Spectres have failed to learn from all of their various influences is that, if you are making this kind of music, less is very often more. My Bloody Valentine got away with ten minute songs (and then some) because no-one had done that at the time, but Spectres just aren’t big enough or different enough to do that, nor do they have the pure technical skills of Kevin Shields and co, meaning that many of these songs are simply twice as long as they needed to be. Lead single ‘Sea of Trees’ is a case in point, going from vaguely interesting textures in the opening half to a dull squall of noise for the rest of its nine-plus minutes.