Posted on: June 2, 2012 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0


 

The emotive style of The Sixfifteens really seems as if the band should have hit it big over ten years ago instead of just coming out now. “Model Glue” is a completely radio-friendly track and really succeeds due to a strong hand behind the production and a maturity that most bands just cannot enjoy. The instrumentation on “Montreal” is more of the same, with a tremendous amount of tension created by the interaction that the various parts of the band create between the interactions that they have with each other. What is really nice with The Sixfifteens is the fact that they can create tracks that would normally be construed as tremendously long (say, four and five minutes) and get a free pass due to an instrumentation that never suffers from the extreme length.

Even considering the fact that many of The Sixfifteens tracks contain high levels of distortion that tend to obscure the music beneath (a track like “Tex Watson” is guilty of this), a tremendous amount of emotion is able to escape. This emotional content is what endears listeners to The Sixfifteens’ cause, and ties together pretty disparate elements. “I’m A Shit” brings The Sixfifteens into completely new territory, as the stumbling, spat-out vocals add a hurried sound to the track that had not been present before on “Feature, Conference, Transfer”. With tracks like “Whose Heart Do I Have?”, The Sixfifteens even move further back the indie rock family tree to have the same crisp sound and snowball-like tempo of bands like Mission To Burma and “Transmission”-era Joy Division. “Everything Brand New” brings The Sixfifteens into an entirely new realm of pop influence that keeps the disc “Brand New” even in the latest segments of the music here.

For a band that has many of the Dryer members, The Sixfifteens actually increases the stock of the previous brand with the most intense indie rock since the days of “Academy Fight Song” and “Waiting Room”. This is emo before the latest brand of boy-bands came out, this is the grunge/indie fusion of the early nineties, this is all that and more. Hopefully the next album (in 2006) will come out to rave reviews and the band can actually start calling their own shots and having bands that they are better than (like Superdrag and Radio 4) open for them instead of vice versa. “Feature, Conference, Transfer” is technically, emotionally, and intensely brilliant.

Top Tracks: Montreal, Everything Brand New

Rating: 7.1/10

The Sixfifteens – Feature, Conference, Transfer / 2005 Fake Chapter / 10 Tracks / http://www.thesixfifteens.com / http://www.fakechapter.com / Reviewed 24 December 2005

[JMcQ]

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