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Debut album from the Ayr-born indie band.
Published by Posh
17th May 2008
'Drive-By Argument' - Drive-By Argument
It appears to be law that every review or discussion of Drive-By Argument (yes, the name is a ‘Family Guy’ reference) must centre around their formation as part of an assignment at university, as if having five members chosen at random somehow invalidates anything they produce. ‘They can’t be 4 real!!!’ Internet warriors cry from their keyboards, possibly as they drool over the new album from boys-only public school-acquainted Radiohead. The Beatles met in a garden centre. Black Sabbath met through an ad in the local corner shop. It doesn’t matter. No one should care.
If anything, being thrown together randomly has gifted this band with a palette slightly wider than your average indie band. I suspect that frontman Stoke would like the band to sound like The Postal Service and is constantly being sabotaged by their guitarists more mainstream indie leanings and the keyboardists failed attempts to turn most of the songs on this eponymous debut album into full-on techno rampages. The band themselves describe it, tongue presumably in cheek, as ‘emotronica’ and ‘four-to-the-floor unhappy hardcore’.
If anything, you want them to go further with the disparate sounds as the current results can occasionally come off as rather pale and compromised (see the Bloc Party-esque ‘The Sega Method’, which could do with loosening up and embracing some of the big dirty synths which appear elsewhere on the record). Maybe it’s because this album dates from 18 months ago and is only seeing light now due to label complications, but some of the dance elements the band and press people are so keen to play up sound tacked-on and dated in the light of Pendulum’s ballsier indie-dance hybrid. When it comes together though, as on previous single ‘Dance Like No One’s Watching’, it’s easily the equal if-not-better than any number of indie-rock anthems currently assaulting the charts.
Conversely, the album’s best moment comes in the shape of the lovely (if inappropriately named) ‘There’s Nothing as Epic as Golden Axe’, an almost folky, Scottish-accent-tinged emo strumalong with a pretty (and maddeningly catchy) Nintendo-esque keyboard melody that couldn’t be any further from ‘four-to-the-floor’. They should be glad to have five different musicians with differing tastes if it means they can ransack genres so effortlessly – internet curmudgeons be damned.
