Pendulum - 'Other Side'
The thing I love best about this lot is people are tying themselves in knots trying to find the right genre word to describe the music that they make. Is it drum 'n' bass? Is it rock? Is it pop? It's the kind of debate YouTube comments were made for, and as soon as someone puts an idea forward as to what kind of music you could say Pendulum is, twelve other people give them the kind of abuse you would normally reserve for the person who has pulled a loved one's head clean off and then spat on the neck stump.
I would like to say that this is the kind of passion that the band create in their rabid fanbase, but it's more about people being Brave Online again...
And it's all good fun, really. Trying to work out whether a band who use a lot of dance tricks in their rock music are still allowed to be considered a 'proper' band or not. Hell, the NME ran an entire article about them in which they pondered whether it's OK to like them or not, like there is some kind of list written on Bobby Gillespie's bedroom wall of all the bands in the world, and it's split in two.
Anyway, stuff it, this song has good things and bad things about it, and they're far more interesting than where the song fits within the Pantheon Of Musical Excellence.
The good things are as follows:
Nice dramatic introduction, which by rights should lead the band into something as good as 'Backstreet's Back' by the Backstreet Boys. I'm not even joking.
A proper tune that you can remember and whistle.
Good twiddly bits, guitarist.
Ditto, synthoid person.
And now the bad things:
Doesn't ever really take off on record. The guitars are too quiet and everything sounds a bit clinical.
Vocoders. A good idea in theory, but they get very dreary very quickly. Apart from the bit at the end, which sounds proper G-funk.
Which means the ideal genre for a song like this is 'Music which doesn't seem to have quite captured what the band had in mind....'
Download: Out now
CD Released: July 28th
(Fraser McAlpine)
PS: puts the genre argument rather well, by saying "You will enjoy this album a lot more if you do not realise that Pendulum were meant to be a drum and bass artist."
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