Albums

Anonymous Tip - Greetings from the wasteland.

Sam Wetherell 17/05/2005

Rating: 1/5

Ah to be fourteen years old again eh? No? In fact I agree, I too would rather die than be fourteen years old again…

Don't be fooled by the pretty little Go! Team-esque cover art, there is nothing to separate this band apart from the legions of spiky haired first-time-dope-smokers who rehearse punk covers of Oasis songs in sheds all over suburban middle England. Firm in the belief that the faster the drumming and the fewer the chords, the better the music, “Anonymous Tip” are the newest editions to the horribly bloated almost-but-not-quite-pop-punk market. They are crammed in, shoulder-to-shoulder, with Snuff, This Ain't Vegas and No Comply, drinking cheap beer and discussing the best websites for watching home-video footage of people falling off skateboards.

With the exception of “Space Fluid” (more on that later), Greetings from the Wasteland is a handful of bothersome snot-punk ditties, with hoarsely shouted vocals and monotonous 24-second guitar solos. The lyrics are so unmentionable I'm compelled to mention them - “I can't bear to see you with someone else/My emotions have gone wild/My emotions have gone wild/Yeah” - is the first line of the first song. The “Yeah” is preceded (probably) by a short and rather awkward pause. I have just closed my eyes and pointed randomly at the lyrics sheet, to demonstrate to you how consistently bad this song writing is. This is what I've found: “What was that/Some big phat (yes, they did actually use that word) octopus/Santa's big zone/I've never been so alone”. Its caught between “omg! I'm like so random!” (“Santa's big zone”) and ugly dewy centred keep-it-in-a-little-book-under-the-bed emo poetry (“I've never been so alone”). The worst mistake this band made (well OK not the worst mistake - that's probably the overall quality of the music…) was to publish the lyrics in the CD sleeve.

Now, back to “Space fluid”. We all know that in these troubled musical times, ska is punk's younger and more charismatic brother in law. This is why all the good modern punk bands (Capdown, The Fat Cats, The Cod) are actually ska bands. “Space fluid”, however, reduces ska to punk's gibbering deranged second cousin, who sleeps in the attic and lives off small insects. It sounds less like the Dead 60s, and more like a rabble greasy kids, who went a bit mad after discovering the machine that makes your voice echo during a GCSE music lesson.

Like all eighteen year olds I secretly believe that I was found underneath a rock, fully clothed, eighteen months ago. Thus listening to six rather flimsy punk songs that remind me that yes, at some point in the distant past, I was actually fourteen is not exactly my cup of tea.