The Laurels - Mesozoic EP

Thu 18th Aug, 2011 in Music Reviews

Of all the descriptions that have been thrown in The Laurels’ direction – and there have been many: ‘Good’, ‘great’, ‘dangerous’, ‘luscious’ – few would dare to say groundbreaking, or innovative. If someone did, then that was very kind of them, but the truth is that The Laurels have no interest in reinventing the wheel. They are more interested in using the wheel to travel back in time, to 1990, when fey, shoegazing dinosaurs walked the earth. Namely Ride, to whom The Laurels owe a considerable debt.

Since rock & roll is not about innovation so much as volume, let’s not lose too much sleep over this one. Since Mesozoic is basically all about riffs, the most important thing is: Are the riffs any good?

Well, on What She Does To Me, the guitars are so big that they squash the vocals completely. An absolute wall of churning, tremolo-heavy chords burst down the centre of the mix, so that Piers Cornelius and Luke O’Farrell’s Mark Gardener/Andy Bell-style cooing wafts by as if in a dream. Counter intuitively, their feather-light vocal delivery adds weight to their rather direct lyrics. When, that is, the lyrics can be discerned under the guitar onslaught.

Black Cathedral only gets around to bothering with lyrics about two minutes in, and unsurprisingly, the intervening time is loaded with skull-compressing riffs. Good riffs? Absolutely. A pile of spindly melodic motifs pressed together into a snarling contrapuntal beast, all sharp edges and bad breath, Black Cathedral is a study in restrained brutality.

What’s more, there’s a rawness to the production, on Black Cathedral and the rest of the EP, that really gives the impression of a band on the edge of chaos – as a side note, it’s nice to hear a hyped Australian band that resists the urge to hire Scott Horscroft and put soft-focus electronic washes in every spare inch of sonic real estate. Mesozoic is the sound of a live band, a very good one, doing their thing in a room of well-placed mics.

However, by the time the EP plays itself out, it’s something of a relief. However good the individual songs are, and however impressive the band’s sound is, six songs is a long time between breaths. Admittedly Run For Cover provides a change of pace, offering a BRMC-like, opiated star-jam, but even it is just so airless, so dense.

Mesozoic is fun while it lasts, but while it’s long on volume, it’s a little short on depth and variation. As good is it is, and as good as The Laurels might become, their best moments still remind you of something better.