Editor’s Note: “Short Cuts” is a new (hopefully weekly) segment featuring new-ish albums. The reviewer is still going to listen 10 times, but the reviews will be short and staid. Enjoy.
What is it with random euro post-punk/math/indie bands coming around about once a year and blowing my face off with rad walls of guitar rock? Mutiny on the Bounty from Luxembourg are the latest in a long (though sparse) line of these bands starting with Refused in 1998 and steadily continuing through others like JR Ewing, and more recently, Ungdomskulen. They are, in the most basic sense, loud, screamy mathrock. What they are not is boring, if occasionally stupid lyrics don’t mess up your guitar-boner. (Such is life in the english-as-a-second-language music world. My hips don’t lie.)
Originality is not the name of the game with Mutiny on the Bounty. Execution on the other hand is commendable. For instance, if we were to play the Which-Favorite-Bands-Are-They-Like game, I would count among their peers Fall of Troy, (Minus the endless tech jack-off,) Mars Volta, (Minus the endless jam/vocal jack-off) and maybe even modestly expressed bits of the Frodus/Bluetip/Unwound camps. While their influences are clear and obvious, they absolutely do justice to the genre, and moreover, have crafted something that is a great deal of fun both for the band, and for us.
Danger Mouth, their debut, opens with the polyrhythmic “Call Me Cheesus,” a joyous math-guitar bombast, and doesn’t let up for 40 minutes. The vocals are mostly screams, sometimes harmony and generally great, if fairly unpolished. A few of the tracks are instrumental numbers, ranging from the techy “Cruz Candelaria” to the epic finisher “One Man Orchestra.” Like I said, if you are a big lyric-reader, you may be left wanting (see track 8: “1, 2, 3, 4, I Declare Thumb War”), but otherwise I can’t recommend Mutiny on the Bounty highly enough.