I Am Giant’s second album comes barging out of the starting block with the grinding riffs of ‘Echo from the Gallows’, a stellar track whose combination of spiralling, atmospheric guitar work and heavy, monstrously catchy chorus effortlessly commands attention. Vocalist Ed Martin has a powerful and distinctive voice and the juxtaposition of soaring vocal melodies and crunching, brutish but slickly produced pop-metal makes the first half of the album instant and infectious.
For a good 20 minutes, it’s banger after banger: ‘Razor Wire Reality’ and ‘Death of You’ are the two best songs mid-00s era Funeral For a Friend never wrote, while the “Say something to me” hook in the gentler ‘Transmission’ will shamelessly make itself at home in your brain on first listen. Things start to go awry at the half way mark, though. The opening riff in ‘Silhouette’ harks back just a little too closely to P.O.D’s ‘Alive’ without the anthemic pay-off, while ‘Dragging the Slow Dance Out’ – with its inadvertently apt title- fancies itself as a slow-burning power ballad but seems to throw off the pace of the entire effort.
Now, there’s a lot to like here and the whole thing sounds every bit as elephantine as you’d hope from a band called I Am Giant. Ultimately it’s the plain, old-fashioned inconsistency which lets the album down. Like the unequal wacky-to-backy distribution of the joints after which 90s indie has-beens Toploader take their name, ‘Science & Survival’ packs all the good stuff into one end; it starts out cool, crushing and confident but fizzles out to an unsatisfying conclusion.
This may not quite be the album which sends them all the way up the beanstalk but based on the best of these tracks, and with the recent addition of erstwhile Exit Ten frontman Ryan Redman to their ranks, I Am Giant are ones to watch in the future.
ROB BARBOUR