Non-Atrocity Exhibition

One of the joys of being a blog writer, apart from the obvious one of pure narcissism, is that from time to time, people/bands/record labels will send you demos/tracks to listen to. This doesn't often happen to me so it's always a nice suprise when it does. Even more so when the tracks in question are really worth listening too.

One such arrived from Of National Importance Records recently in regards to a band called 'The Exhibition' and their new 4 track demo EP. I'm very pleased they asked me to review it, because it's really very good indeed.

The First Track is - 'The Boy And The Tearaway' The title has the slight ring of Morrissey about it, and so does the vocal on immediate listen, but once the pounding drums, swirling shoegazey guitar and impassioned vocals all start to gel, you get the sense that this isn't going to be a copy cat band, The Exhibition have a sound in their one right.

Second track - 'Things That Hide In The Dark' starts with a guitar line that reminds of 'The Rapture or maybe Factory records circa '81/82. It's tremendously catchy too, whilst retaining a dark sound that's pretty prevalent throughout the whole EP.

'Reaction' is the third track and to these ears sounds a bit like The Cribs. This is no bad thing in itself, but the band then take that as a starting point and dart off in entirely different directions. Again the strong drum sound propels this on to great things.

Final track - 'Bright New Worlds' is probably my pick of the bunch, mainly because it's anthemically catchy, a bit brighter, and perhaps slightly more rounded, but there's not much between the tracks to be honest.

All in all this is a really impressive release for a band who are still in the early days of their career, especially since it's tagged as a demo. The instrumention throughout is uniformly great as are the quality of the vocals. Yes it's possible to play spot the influence here and there, but what the band do and do well is to take those influences and mould them into something different and new. There's no reason why The Exhibition can't build on what they've done here and go onto even better things. Definitely a band to look out for in the future.

If you want to listen yourself, and you should, then you can find the EP on Last.FM here and on Myspace here