The Wagner Logic : Easiest to Grab

The Wagner Logic – Easiest to Grab cover

The Wagner Logic – Easiest to Grab (Jamendo)

The normal habit for people posting their work on Jamendo is to say ‘we can’t define ourselves by a genre’, which is annoying and usually completely untrue but such is life I suppose. A rather more bizarre habit though is to list genres which you clearly have nothing to do with, which I can only assume The Wagner Logic did by accident when they typed ‘Punk’ in the little box given that, in the words of Bill Bailey, they’re about ‘as Punk as Enya’. Now I hope it was a typo on their behalf but it could just be that in the wilds of Alaska anyone who manages to stir themselves from their hibernation long enough to cobble together an album of rather dull Indie is rated as a radical free spirit, raging against the system and fighting the machine, or polar bears, or whatever it is Alaskans do.

And now that the rather bitchy bit of the review is done I’ll move on to the nice bit… which might take a little more time to work out actually… ‘Easiest to Grab’ isn’t all that bad for Indie, although that’s not saying all that much and at times you can almost hear where they got this Punk idea from although even the most archetypal of Punk flourishes (i.e. screaming) seem muted and tame here, robbed of passion and imbued with dirginess, a word I choose to believe exists. This album just grinds on through, getting louder in parts as it attempts to do… something, anything, but even when they, presumably, attempt to turn it up to eleven it still sounds like a negligable force emerging from the speakers as opposed to the smack in the face that Punk should offer.

Of course this sort of thing really isn’t made for me at all I suppose, I never could understand the proliferation of whining American singers with their endless navel gazing and strumming but I’m told that some folks do rock out to this sort of thing. It takes all sorts I guess and I suppose that if the idea of actually listening or dancing to music completely overwhelms you and leaves you shuddering in the corner then this might be a safely neutral choice but once you’ve reached that point I’m not sure you really want to listen to music at all, better perhaps to spend an hour or two in an isolation tank if monotony and sensual deprivation are your thing.

The production though is… average actually, I was going to attempt to be nice there but I’d be lying if I heaped any praise on it. I suppose it does the job and we’ll leave it at that lest I be thought a complete bastard.

Anyway, I’ve found my niche, all those other bloggers, they try to bring you the best of the best and pour enthusiasm over every new discovery, I bitch and whine about stuff I should have given up on after the first song. And all I ever wanted was a little bit of Punk…

Download ‘Easiest to Grab’

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