Stream City – Hello Gravity

Damn. I’m truly scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to shitty analogies here, but Hello Gravity’s coming across like a used car in a huckster’s lot: undeniably slick on the outside, but of a questionable caliber and an oddly piecemealed interior. These Danish dudes have created a wildly varied assortment of sounds here, all of which are clambering over each other and vying for top slot; instead of a smooth transition, these influences (ska, screamo, 90’s melodicore) collide with each other. The effect is more jarring than anything else and the end result becomes pretty forgettable.

They can certainly play, no doubt – the musicianship itself is wire-tight. The vocalist, when he isn’t growling like he’s in some kind of Chain Of Strength cover band, frequently sounds like a dead ringer for the guy from Randy. They also seem to be taking heavy cues from those kinda-sorta skapunk bands of yore like Against All Authority and Falling Sickness, but the music loses a lot of its charm because it’s so weirdly, metronomically precise. A lot of the momentum they’re going for seems to be lost because everything is just so slick, you know? There’s also the frequent use of a violin thrown in there, giving the album an occasionally manic Celtic punk feel. And then they combine that with frequently howled vocals ala your average Level Plane screamo band circa 2002. See what I mean? That’s a big working template, and all of those genres have some pretty deep wells to draw from. It’s a lot to take in and the EP as a whole generally winds up coming across as a big, confused, undeniably well-produced mess.

Hello Gravity is essentially a five song EP when you take away the intro (which the band should have) and within the framework of those five songs, Stream City seems to be a band that’s somewhat at a standstill, unsure of which direction they want to head in. There’s a pretty obvious dichotomy at work: two of the songs clock in at around the one-minute mark, while the others are pushing or go over four minutes. That kind of confusion is threaded throughout the entire release. Like I said, it’s very slick and very well-executed, but the foundation itself is built from too many different materials and what comes across as a half-finished floorplan. The band needs to put their heads together and really decide what direction they want to go in.