‘Bitch, Please!’, the debut EP from Minehead alt-metallers Pretty Little Enemy, is an interesting case of a rarely-exercised nostalgia: that for indie-label British nu-metal.
From the band’s rock-night-at-your-local-community-hall aesthetic to the one-finger chugga-chugga downtuned riffs, everything about PLE suggests a band who had themselves cryogenically frozen mid-song in 2002, and were recently thawed out by someone who didn’t even dry the band down before hitting ‘record’.
It’s not even that the songs are bad per se – ‘Vertebreak’ has a chorus that’s catchy as hell, if highly reminiscent of any number of pop-rock songs from the last 15 years, and vocalist Louise Body can really sing. There are also some intriguing guitar flourishes and punchy bass runs (courtesy of Georgia Bell and Jason Coles respectively) mixed in among the generally uninspired, heavy-lite instrumentation.
But even the production, with its fuzzy guitars strongly separated from a distinctly clanking bass, evokes Nu-metal’s heyday. Given the time to develop an identity of their own, Pretty Little Enemy are undoubtedly capable of producing something exciting. But on ‘Bitch, Please!’ all we get is something that’s been done before by so many bands, and so much better, that it’s hard to see the point.
ROB BARBOUR