Echo Boomer: album
Echo Boomer are a passable jangly guitar band whom you could have sworn made an appearance in the I-remember-them-from-the-90s round of your local pub’s music quiz night. Despite the nostalgic references in their songs, they are a newish outfit with a self-titled mini-album that I’m guessing is their first effort.
On first listening, a couple of good opening tunes swiftly make way to mid-album mediocrity. Waking up with a jolt for Child, you realise you were dozing through the three previous tracks. Treehouse provides a brief coda before the CD player buzzes to a halt, announcing the end of the album. Well, it was decent, but it didn’t really come to life, flick the switch or make me horny. Golden Boy and Suburbia showed flashes of brilliance. Nifty guitar work and Neil Finn-esque vocals remind you how good Crowded House were. But while the songs are all crisply recorded with polished performances, I feel somehow short-changed.
The clue, you could say, is in the title. As many of their melodies are as sluggish as North Oxford’s finest elderly Sunday drivers, and in the absence of a naturally outstanding voice, Echo Boomer have to heap loads of reverb on Jonny Race’s vocal to carry over each note. Indeed, like an overdose of make-up, Firefly’s ‘booming’ vocal compensates for the absence of interest underneath.
Onto the lyrics, which are humorous, being as they are only too appropriate. Jonny Race sings mostly about suburbian monotony and longing after past success, flawlessly reflecting the pedestrian, middle-aged nature of the actual music. Have they missed the killer irony, or are they just playing to their target audience? Either way, in Golden Boy the opening couplet “I’ve been hiding underground / I’ve been making different sounds” is a sitting duck for sarcastic sniggers all round.
But where there are opportunities, they are not always seized, as the pop idiom reigns supreme. In this regard, Sam Race on lead guitar should be feeling most short-changed. At the lines, “I wanna smash it up / I wanna break it down” on Child, his guitar is permitted an underwhelming squelch.
Echo Boomer are at the very least a ‘safe choice’ for a decent band-night down your local. They will not knock you for six, nor ruin your quiet Sunday evening with unannounced weirdness. Slurping on your pint and applauding politely at the appropriate moments, you will be gently lulled along by their comforting but far-from-unpredictable guitar nuggets, before returning home to dig out your Crowded House collection.
By B.M.
Tags: echoboomer
