You can say that Fake Plastic makes music in a broadly speaking rock sense, but if you tried to tie them down any more tightly than that, you would find yourself on difficult ground. But isn’t that how it should be? Surely it is better that a band, even a rock band,…especially a rock band, can throw around a few sonic curveballs, keep you guessing, and keep things interesting than just do what everyone else is doing?
And curveballs abound here, eleven tracks that run around the rockscape, reinventing, rebelling, turning over the apple cart of expectation, setting fire to the rule book, a band making music without the millstone of conformity hanging around their neck. At last, I hear you cry.
“Pale Moon” sets the album up nicely. It is a song that starts in a quirky indie place and then slowly transitions into a squalling slice of grungey rock and roll. There are acoustic vibes with “Waiting/Working,” which has a rootsy, Americana (that is everyone’s favorite buzzword at the moment, isn’t it?) flavor, “Run Away With Me” is foot-on-the-monitor, rock and roll with a lovely retro vibe and “The Long Night” has a wonderfully evocative sound, a more bombastic take on the soul-rock revue, smooth and spacious when it wants to be, brash and full on when it wants to change the mood.
If you picked the music apart, you would find every type of rock present, at least all the genres that matter, from garage rock to prog, indie-infused grooves to folky/rocky finesse, hard rock anthemics, and grunge’s abrasive drive. But, of course, the art is to be able to take these existing building blocks, these much-used elements, and create whole new swathes of sonic architecture, new creative directions of travel. And that is what Fake Plastic is so adept at, and never more so than the music they have created on Awake in the Night.
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