Demos

Tallulah Fix - EP

Owain Paciuszko 21/02/2011

Rating: 3/5

Big fat riffage is the modus operandi for AWOL, a blues rock swagger with croaky barked vocals from lead singer Rich Monk, howling that 'Labour is intensive/and expensive/on your time' like the warped lovechild of Tom Waits and Roger Daltrey. The opener is swaggeringly straight-forward, strutting around with such ludicrous assurity that it's almost a parody, but played with straight-faces.

Things go decidedly Motorhead via early-Kings of Leon on Stranger, there's some extremely impressive gurlgy shouting from Monk; his voice switching to a sneery drawl at times, lending a nice contrast to the strutting lead guitar of Scott Mcfadyen. Closing track Serotonin Sickness has a somewhat slightly too familiar riff lingering in the background, and feels like an extended epilogue to Stranger; Monk squawks 'Somebody help me!' over and over, but it lacks the frenzied desperation required to really stoke the fires of rock and roll after the earlier snappier tracks.

Tallulah Fix, a four-piece from Worcestershire, make an impressively old school sound and really have some strong alt-rock chops, but for a genre so defined by excess this EP is oh-so slight and lacking some real personality to make them stand out. They all play well together and Monk has some great vocal chords, but on this record they don't quite have the tunes to match their talents.