I’m of an age now where most of my go-to musical references are well past their sell-by date, but to me, there is something that chimes with that pioneering post-punk spirit of my formative days at the heart of “Don’t Fall.” Sure, you can throw around terms like grunge and garage or alternative rock, and they all tell us something about what is going on here. But for me, it is that blend of spaciousness and chiming sophistication, raw guitars and pop-aware contagion, chilled edge and understatement that has me reaching for those adventurous records of my youth.
Not that anything found here is backward-looking; this may be a nod to what has gone before, intentional or otherwise, but it is no plundering or plagiarising of past glories. Loudness Wars has a sound all of its own. Unique, fit for purpose and of the here-and-now.
It is a sound too finessed to merely be labelled grunge or garage rock, infused with too much dark mystique to be simply tagged alt-rock; instead, it seems to sit at a place where darkwave and post-punkery, goth and new wave all infect the rock and roll sound to create new strands of music after the punks had stormed the barricades and levelled the playing field.
I guess what we hear in music is based on many things, not least our age and record collection, the scenes we grew up in, the sounds we danced too, but when I cut to the chase, all I can say for sure is that Loudness Wars have made an old (okay, not that old) man very happy.
