‘James and the Cold Gun’ isn’t going to go down as AOTY material, but what the band have produced will for sure go down as a great way to truly kick off their careers as the latest bright stars of the Welsh music scene
If you look carefully, it’s impossible not to see it; the fierce punk spirit that inhabits the alternative music scene of Wales. From the grounded rap of Astroid Boys, to the intense post-hardcore of Casey, the country has a penchant for producing uncompromising and damn good music.
Now, after years of intense touring, with a particularly fantastic live show, and hard work culminating in a dedicated listening community, James and the Cold Gun seek to truly make their mark on the scene with their eponymous debut. Formed originally by core duo James Joseph and James Bliss, the outfit has expanded to a complete five piece with this latest release, and their sound shows it.
‘James And The Cold Gun’ is an album packed wall to wall with noisy, unapologetic walls of punkish aggression, with fuzzed out guitars, infectious bass lines, and vocal melodies delivered with a slick and swaggering manner that almost feels a little arrogant in a tongue-in-cheek way. It clearly draws inspiration from the grunge and alternative sounds of 90’s rock, but constantly seeks ways of ensuring this open inspiration doesn’t feel derivative, and with the band’s enigmatic charisma, they do a damn good job at succeeding.
‘Chewing Glass’ kicks the album off in a gritty and raucous style, with its punchy garage rock vibes, whilst ‘All the Wrong Places’ packs some pretty catchy and fun vocal harmonies. Both ‘Bittersweet’ and ‘Headlights’ are particularly monstrous sounding, with the former bringing a moody grunge sound layered over a kicking bass line, and the latter swinging at the listener with immense distorted bass and guitar.
The band showcase some great variety later into the album as well. ‘Grey Through the Same Lens’ is a melancholic acoustic cut with some particularly gorgeous yet understated vocal melodies, and arrives at the perfect time in the track listing to give room to breathe. ‘Cheating on the Sun’ provided some incredibly unexpected grandiosity from the outfit, with those vocal melodies taking on a soaring presence in this huge track, somehow managing just as immense as the soaring guitar passages.
Truly, this is an album with a lot to love, but it’s also an album that makes a couple of mistakes that prevent it from being more than just a decent listen. For example, the pacing here is completely all over the place, with the first handful of tracks struggling to truly get off the ground, before the album launches into an exceptional midsection, and then fizzles out before strangely ending on back-to-back epics that ultimately leaves the end of the album feeling stretched thin.
Tracks such as ‘Something to Say’, ‘Saccharine’, and ‘Alone Again’ just don’t have much about them that is worth talking about, acting as dead weight to an otherwise exciting listen. Furthermore, ‘Cheating on the Sun’ makes for a perfect album closer, whilst ‘Three Years’ just feels a little tacked on, and perhaps would have fitted better around the midpoint of the album to give the whole body of work an axis to rotate around. There’s an ambition here, but it just feels a little scattered.
But scattered ambition is vastly superior to none; what this album lacks in cohesiveness, it more than makes up for in simple sheer fun. ‘James and the Cold Gun’ isn’t going to go down as AOTY material, but what the band have produced will for sure go down as a great way to truly kick off their careers as the latest bright stars of the Welsh music scene. When this outfit truly get going, their ferocity leaves everyone else around them eating their dust. A little more of that, and for certain we’ll have something special to listen to.
RATING: 73/100 – Good
For Fans Of: Bad Nerves, Crawlers, Salem, Royal Blood
Physical copies of ‘James and the Cold Gun’ are available here.
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