Tripdash – This Spells Disaster

Great! Yet another monotonous pop punk band with absolutely nothing whatsoever interesting about them and whose only discernible talent is being able to string clichés together at an alarming rate. This EP feels like it’s been put together with the express intention of trying to cover as many commercial bases as possible, but fails on all counts.

Obviously when Tripdash sing about complicated issues they really mean it, maaaaan. When the crux of ‘High Expectations’ is the oft-repeated “What’s the point of shouting about it when you could be on stage protesting about it?” they completely miss any opportunity to say something worth listening to – however many times you chuck in faux-intellectual lines like “Life…they’re gonna take it away” (this is the deepest they get) it doesn’t make stupid vagaries mean anything in particular. And when the execrable ‘Channel 5’ invades your ears with the genuinely embarrassing “Masturbation’s keeping me alive” it simply proves how utterly awful this band are. How can you try and make a coherent social commentary on the loss of opportunity for young people (the painful ‘The Crude Circuit’) when the following track is about a sneaky wank on a Friday night? Put simply, who gives a fuck? But the most startling example of Tripdash‘s woeful inability to anyone beyond the busload of family and friends that I’ll bet turn up for each of their gigs, is when the pointless ‘One Of Those Days’ when the line “I can’t explain it all in a song” makes you sit up and shout “WHY THE FUCK DID YOU RECORD IT AND GIVE IT TO ME IF YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT?!”.

So we’ve established that Tripdash are, at best, lyrically abysmal. But if the music was a stunning exercise in well-crafted melodic pop-punk they might escape with two and a half stars but…wait…no, the music’s shite too. It’s not even necessarily bad, it’s just so contrived and unoriginal that you wonder how many management companies and record labels they sent it off to in the vain hope of cracking “the music industry”. I can’t think why anyone would choose to make music this dull if money wasn’t the stimulus. I’m trying to pick out a specific moment but I can’t…the stodgy riffs and uninspiring chord sequences are so prevalent that everything blurs into one horribly poppy mess. Worst of all, the vocals are distressingly nasal, with a whine that’s been cultivated to specifically make him sound somewhere between a nu-metal muppet and a Californian surfer. For a band from Newcastle, that’s a bit of an achievement.

But here’s the paragraph where I talk about all the redeeming features of ‘This Spells Disaster’. Short, isn’t it? Guess why? There aren’t any. Except when it ends, and beautiful silence massages my ears.

Ben

www.tripdash.tk