18 Nov Music-Reviewer.com reviews Everyday Including
Great new review from Music-Reviewer.com with lots of flattering comparisons to bands like Snow Patrol, The Psychedelic Furs, The Velvet Underground and Echo & The Bunnymen. Recommending us with an 8 out of 10, the reviewer concludes with this little gem, “if you were thinking of slitting your wrists on a rainy Saturday afternoon, slapping EVERYDAY INCLUDING into the player would drag you back from the precipice. Gently.
See it here…
Music-Reviewer.com
I’m not a huge fan of shoe-gaze music, but it certainly can have its moments. The Union Trade, a quartet from San Francisco, doesn’t quite fit comfortably into the genre, but the release of EVERYDAY INCLUDING, its first full length project, shows a nodding familiarity with the genre’s stronger points while paying attention to the elements that bands which work that particular minefield normally ignore.
Sure, the bonafides of the sub-genre are there, what with the vocals mixed way down and muddy into the swamp of sound, and the lead guitar riffs which are more sculpted than played, ala Edge or Tom Verlaine. But there’s attention paid to the basics, like songwriting, and dynamics, so that you don’t slap EVERYDAY including on the player and then wonder, sixty minutes later, what has been going on. Otherwise tracks like “Self Possession” and “Talk” would just kind of meld into each other. They don’t; somebody is paying attention here. “Accident Prone” sounds a bit like Snow Patrol and “For The Resilient,” I swear, sounds like it was, uh, influenced by “Imitation of Christ” by The Psychedelic Furs. The Velvet Underground-like “Strings Break,” the cinematic “Violent and Beautiful,” and the Echo & Bunnymen-like “Talk” keep the changes coming.
These guys do a lot with two guitars/vocals, bass, and drums. The strength is in their songwriting — nice work, guys — and attention to the finer details. And while the argument over burying the vocals and treating them like just another instrument, as opposed to putting them up front, has been going on since the Rolling Stones released AFTERMATH, burying them seems to work, however improbably, here. And if you were thinking of slitting your wrists on a rainy Saturday afternoon, slapping EVERYDAY INCLUDING into the player would drag you back from the precipice. Gently. Recommended.
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