‘Hold Your Applause’ marks the return of Bracket and is the first album in eight years from the ex-Fat Wreck Chords signings. Self recorded, mixed, and released, it was preceded and financed by a series of digital releases. Unfortunately it gets off to a weak start; opening song ‘Not A Pear’ is instantly forgettable as the dull harmonies and acoustic backing do little else other than highlight the poor production. Thankfully ‘Caving In’ possesses enough energy to shine through the limitations, sounding like The Ergs at their punchy and melodic best.
Unfortunately Bracket fail to capitalise on their potential, as once the upbeat ‘The Light’ and the ukulele-led ‘She’s My Eraser’ is over the album begins to take a dive in quality. At sixteen songs, ‘Hold Your Applause’ is far too long. To justify an album of this length the quality has to be incredibly high and when you have to contend with the dreary ‘Mandy Lynn’ or the album filler that is ‘The Opportunist’, it’s clear that they chose quantity over anything else. By the end of track nine, ‘My Phantom Limb’, the promise shown by the earlier songs is becoming a distant memory.
Bracket stated that “we threw in some ukes, mandolin, and other things we could hit and make sounds with”, but the extra instrumentation is at times barely noticeable and adds little to the songs where it is more prominent. In particular, ‘A Striking Disappearance’ is nothing short of frustrating, at close to five minutes long there is a perfectly listenable song hidden within but it’s surrounded by wasted space that dulls any effect it might have had otherwise. ‘Gone’ and ‘Habit’ do their best to raise the quality level above acceptable but hidden down in the lower reaches of the album they could easily go unheard if you give up listening before then.
The constant and overriding feeling of ‘Hold Your Applause’ is that it sounds dated and weak. Nearly all its moments of promise are blighted by poor production. The drums are weak throughout, and the often feeble guitars serve only to irritate. Self-funding and releasing a new album is always an admirable approach but in this case it was not worth the effort. It’s really no different to anything Bracket has previously released and unless you are a die-hard Bracket fan, there is little here to convert you. Quite simply, ‘Hold Your Applause’ has turned out to be a more literal title than Bracket probably intended.
CHRIS HILSON