"... ridiculously catchy power-pop affairs.... heavenly layers of guitars... rocks irresistibly, with songs like the Who-ish blast of power chording and Guided By Voices-style skewhiff pop sensibility of "Motor Skills", the dignified and delicious "Shapeshifters" and the Charles Darwin-meets Devo-style (lack of) evolution commentary "God Monkey Robot" all proffering choruses that nestle snugly in your synapses. Heidinger, meanwhile, gets (meta) physical with the none-more fatalistic musings of the self-explanatory "Cemeteries," but the spring in the music's step is anything but sepulchral. Actually, the juxtaposition between the band's apparent apocalypse-tomorrow lyrical obsessions and the immediacy and atmosphere of their music is one of the aspects of The Apparitions' oeuvre that ensures you will return to them. Indeed, songs as disparate as the Radiohead-circa-"Street Spirit" enigma of "You Chirp Just Like Little Sparrows" and the dreamy, neo-Biblical "She Burned Out Their Eyes" display an alarmingly impressive diversity, while the there-by-the-grace urban horror of "With Wolf Clothes On" is wrapped up in the sort of guitar hook it would take a JCB to remove. Hearteningly, it all ends on a brief, but thoroughly lovely note of positivity with the blink-and-you'll-miss-it "Positively Charged", where Heidinger sings "your heart skips a beat for all the right reasons", which indeed it does as you listen to this going-places foursome. Indeed, while "As This Is Futuristic" sometimes delves into humanity's longer shadows, it invariably comes up sounding life-affirming and suggests The Apparitions deserve more than to remain a rarely-seen, ghostly presence on pop's top table." - Whisperin & Hollerin U.K.
Login
Add tags