Belvedere Jehosophat - Monday, 8 August 2005
The Devastations sound like Nick Cave, and there's really no escaping the comparison.
I've played the record for several different people now and the verdict has always come back Nick Cave - save for one friend in America who claimed that he heard a mix of Nick Cave and Johnny Cash.
To The Devestations' credit, however, they have managed to craft ten good songs that offer enough surprises - in the form of little blasts of feedback or duets or instrumentals, etc - to posit a sufficient argument for why you wouldn't just keep listening to Nick Cave.
And whilst the first five songs are very good, the second half of the record does drag a little, but I can't tell if it's because the batch of songs found there just happen to sound very similar or if the music is, by that stage of the record, beginning to cloy.
(I also can't help but feel that if the two folk/traditional-sounding instrumentals had been better tracked the album could have flowed a little better.)
In short, whilst The Devestations isn't the most innovative record in the world, it still certainly allows itself be heard. I paid twenty dollars for this CD and it has, save for a few instances here and there, been constantly spinning in my CD player since I bought it last Friday.
Whether I'll ever break it out again after I'm done listening to it remains, of course, to be seen...
Also, the cover art reminds me of that of Rudimentary Peni.
Yvars knew what he was about to say - and what everyone was thinking at the same time - that they were not sulking, that their mouths had been closed, they had to take it or leave it, and that anger and helplessness sometimes hurt so much that you can't even cry out.