When sending in a cd for review it’s very important to try and adhere to the following suggestions: always mark the cd that you’ve sent in with the band name and album title; always include a tracklisting so the reviewer can distinguish each song and, where possible, include a biography that at least explains a little about the band and doesn’t just list loads of bands who you like. Unfortunately the Leicester-based Wester get off to a very bad start by doing none of the above. The cd isn’t marked, there’s no tracklisting and the bio basically lists their influences. No offence lads, but by hearing the cd I can tell you who sound like.
So that’s basically all I can tell you about Wester. Except they state their influences include DJ Shadow, Coldplay, AFI, Finch and Alkaline Trio, a heady mix indeed. And as you may expect from such a diverse range of bands, Wester suffer from a massive identity crisis. From the opening track which sounds like The Misfits, to the second which sounds like Alkaline Trio, to the third which sounds like AFI…you get the picture. Some songs have screaming backing vocals, others don’t. Some have melodic ‘ghoulish’ vocals, some don’t. Some of the riffs are clean, some are incredibly fuzzy – I think you can tell that I’m not a fan.
So I’ll use the rest of this review to state what I think Wester should do – sit down and start again. They can obviously play their instruments and the (unidentified) singer has a decent enough vocal, but without any cohesion and far too many influences the record sounds horrible. The band are probably at their best at their most violent, track 5 for instance sounds like AFI crossed with The Used and comes off reasonably well, despite the horrific recording quality. After sitting down and working out a natural theme of where the band wants to go, songs have to try and stick to that formula, not in a rigid, lets-be-obvious way, but in a sense that you cannot switch styles and be a jack of all trades. Because you will come out as a master of none.
This probably sounds incredibly pretentious but it’s just my opinion. Wester in this guise probably won’t go very far and this EP is pretty tortuous listening. It could have been a lot worse though, my dad just described them as “talentless” and “shite”…
www.geocities.com/xwesterx
Paul