This a mighty album, the reinvention of Dundee legends Spare Snare with the help of Chem19 (Paul Savage overseeing) and Steve Albini producing, what a story! And the band delivers, in spades…
This is hard scale DIY, nothing fancy, but the production is bar none. The band also deliver song after song of excellence, their thundering sound beating around yer ears…
Opener ‘Action Hero’ is a classic Albini take, with Spare Snare stepping up to the mark, with the strummed guitar then the crunching guitar chorus and backing vocals. Thee is a wild oboe (BM thinks) solo toward the end, good grief…
Track two ‘I Am God’ is a monster, the analogue synth and “Honey I’m home” really pounding the “I am God” lyric home.
There are thundering guitars, primitive synths and some hilarious vocals on this album, most evidently in ‘We Are The Snare’, a kind of “fuck off” to everyone who ever slagged them off – “We don’t do interaction”, “We don’t do songs you know”… “We are the Snare” – credit due…
We also get some more user-friendly tracks, like ‘Photograph Me Properly’ – are they really worried about chin profiles after all these years?… haha! Such an excellent song!
But amid all this there are some sublime moments of melody, for example on ‘And Now It is Over’ – there is a lot of life in this old dog yet..
Spare Snare have excelled themselves and really taken the Albini challenge seriously – fantastic music.