Slight Of Build: "Collide EP"

TRACK LIST:
1. Collide
2. Burn It To The Ground
3. Old Creation
4. All Eyes Down

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NOTES:
Slight Of Builds debut EP "Collide EP" will be out February 7th, 2009 through MGM Distribution.

REVIEWS:

This is a tidy four-track release from an act who are just as at home playing slightly-askew all-of-guitar space-out james as they are taking sweeter, more downbeat detours. If you want to get ridiculously trite about it, it hits like Sonic Youth, but takes like the Morning After Girls. BUt being trite about it is so easy, and these songs deserve better than that. Cinematic wig outs always do. As casual listener #3 inferred to me, it's like 'they can't gaze at their shoes because their guitars are in the way'. Which is cool, they've got a great sensibility about themselves; they lie in between two worlds and the pull Slight Of Build feel from either direction creates some great sonic tension.
- Matt Panag, Beat

Slight of Build, Melbourne's entrant in the shoegaze revival stakes, have one absolute kicker, a couple of strong supporting tracks and one misstep on their debut EP Collide. The title track starts things off and ticks all the boxes for a classic hazy anthemic single. Deserts, driving and dawn lyrical references abound, the guitars squall and shock at all the right moments and vocalist/guitarist Paul Hornsby sounds gritty and heartsick enough to back his narrative of insomniac escape. It'll be the soundtrack to some aspiring guitarist's 2009 highlight reel that's for sure. 'Burn It To The Ground' sits second, occupying a similar aural landscape of opiate drone as Sonic Youth's 'JC'. Full marks to drummer Andrew Polydorou and Adam Shirley on production for actually pulling the depth-charge sonics off - it ends up as an eerie half-remembered glimpse at late-night terrors from the safety of the morning. It might be encumbered with a laboured, largely unsuccessful coda but that doesn't diminish the preceding four or so minutes. The darkness suits them well. 'Old Creation' is the misstep, pissing around for three-and-a-half minutes in the mid-stream of bad noise pop. Hornsby's voice can't sustain the melody he's aiming for and, frankly, the whole thing's better relegated to the skip button function. 'All Eyes Down' is set as the epic closer and it succeeds, even if it feels like it prematurely concludes. It's a tough disc to assess. They definitely get the sheets of noise right, but they never position themselves as anything greater than revivalists. Mercy Arms, Sydney's version of shoegaze Mk II, have the benefit of vocalist Thom Moore's doomed romantic woe and Kirin J Callinan's intrusive, coruscating guitars. Compared to Mercy Arm's idiosyncratic vision, Slight of Build come up short. They're too reliant on the easy tropes of the genre both in lyrics and songwriting. That's not to suggest there's nothing worth building on here. They just need to get off the highway at dawn and mainline straight for the ditch at dusk.
- JP Hammond, Mess + Noise


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