Ever cutting edge in my musical tastes I’m sitting down today to review an EP from 2006 that’s made by a band who have an album freshly released this year. Pitchfork and NME evidently have nothing on me, well, NME certainly doesn’t but in this day and age that’s not much of a boast to make. So, why am I living in the past? Because as is routine with the world of free music you’re largely as likely to find something 3 years after its release as you are to find it 2 days after release, a wonderful bit of time warping for the lazy among us who build their musical collection on the back of smashing random buttons and waiting for something to download.
So, The Shark Bubbles then, German Indie Popsters with a tiny dash of mainstream Punkishness with their age old EP ‘Night Train’. It’s a limited offering consisting largely of early versions of tracks which found greater prominence on their full album, although throughout you could easily think that this is a collection of fully formed songs. The production is, for the most part, really rather nice, as seems to be the norm for a lot of German bands around the Creative Commons scene, a fact which no doubt lends itself well to some archaic stereotype or another but which does make for a fairly high level musical image for the country. So, presentation – good, content – hmmh. There’s certainly nothing to dislike here amongst the perfectly palatable strummings of The Shark Bubbles but as with so much guitar music on the Pop/Indie spectrum of things it’s also hard to build up any particular enthusiasm for it all.
It’s almost a shame that amongst the endless litany of similar bands The Shark Bubbles should fade into semi-anonymity because there are far more dislikeable examples of the style out there and they’re all too often given far too much praise and adoration but the ubiquity of the style is jading. Before it exploded this sort of stuff could have been a pleasant enough addition to any collection but these days it almost makes for an irritating experience. Even the more Rockish interludes here, whilst quite listen able at times, are sort of overlooked by an assumption of apathy towards the sound.
Downloadable? Probably, yeah, it’s good enough to be one of the more enjoyable examples of what it is and hell, some people presumably love the Indie Pop guitar style or how could the charts still be full of it (in the UK at least)? One for genre fans and those with a hard drive to fill perhaps.