A while ago there was a band called ‘Koopa’, who set the record for being the first band to grace the UK Top 40 singles charts while being unsigned. They were a pop-rock band, through and through, with pretty meaningless, innocuous lyrics and those four chords used in the most predictable way. It was cringe-inducing and trite then. It’s 2015 now, and The Red Owls have released ‘Do You Feel Any Better?’. After eight years, does their pop-rock jaunt make me feel any better now than it would have in 2007?
The four-track EP begins with ‘Chaser’. It introduces us with a melody that fades in, using a muffled and reverberating effect which belongs in only the most forgettable of mid-2000 rock songs. That leads into the line: “Could you hold on / for one more song”, which is so bland an opening, literally any line could follow and it wouldn’t matter. Oh, and speaking of effects which are overused and outdated, the choir effect from a Casio keyboard is in the background the whole time. I start to wonder if I can actually hold on for one more song.
With three more tracks on this EP there isn’t much hope for redemption, and The Red Owls don’t show much evidence that they haven’t become trapped in a mould once filled by bands like Feeder, Simple Plan and the aforementioned Koopa. The much needed injection of pace is evident on tracks like ‘Bad Advice’ and ‘Party Lines’, though there is another muffled introductory guitar riff in ‘Bad Advice’ and forgettable lyricism strewn all over the place.
While the drumming is solid and satisfying throughout, the production on ‘Do You Feel Any Better’ is riddled with gimmicks: flat-sounding vocals, predictable melodies and unnecessary effects everywhere. It’s a painful throwback to the most dull rock bands ever to have existed, who would throw together some cliched songwriting onto a heavily recycled chord progression with some chorus and modulation effects and call it a single. ‘Do You Feel Any Better?’ is unfortunately a derivative and impact-less effort.