Well this is a rarity, a good Italian band! When on my travels around Germany last year it was of the general consensus amongst the people I met that the music coming out in Germany was about 2 years behind the UK and US, whilst music in Italy was approximately 3-5 years behind… At The Soundawn have somehow managed to escape the inevitable flock of emo bands now flooding out of mainland Europe and have emerged with ‘We Come In Waves:’ A 7 track record that would sit comfortably in the personal collection of any Poison The Well fan… oh hang on, weren’t they really popular about 4-5 years ago?.. hmm
The main ingredient that At The Soundawn possess that really impressed me on the first couple of listens is their ability to combine both deafeningly aggressive ISIS-like moments with the experimentalism of The Mars Volta. There’s quite a noticeable difference between the two sounds but somehow it just works and at times the results are utterly mesmerising. They do in places sound very similar to Tool/Poison the Well/Khoma but thankfully never quite encroach into rip-off territory. Their knack of blending in subtle moments of post-rock instrumentalism within the destruction does wonders for the eardrums. ‘Phone Will’ is without doubt the best track on the record, gluing the progression of the mini-album together and demonstrating ATS’s obvious skill as songwriters. However, despite a number of special moments throughout the record there is a little too much that I’ve heard done better before by other bands, so for that reason alone I’m afraid I’m left having to use the dreaded p word: potential… they have this in abundance.
It would be easy here to state that if they were English or American then everyone would have heard of them already. The fact is, these days it’s difficult to predict anything within the ever-changing world of the music industry and so I’ll leave that up to you to decide. Perhaps this isn’t quite the newest-sounding record to have found its way onto my stereo recently, but it does just about enough to stretch the boundaries of an already over-saturated genre and in a country that’s produced about as many good bands as the Isle of Man that’s impressive enough for me.
(Disclaimer: This is to S-a-N Promotions. 10/10 on producing a band bio for the review, it was generally very helpful. May I however suggest that you at least know the name of your bands before sending out press releases. They’re not, as you’ve printed no fewer than three times, called: ‘At The SoundMAN’……)
Rich Rowe