Vazum - Western Violence (self-released)

Even with the best will in the world, any generic tag looks to the past. How can it do otherwise? And even though post-punk as a label could be construed as anything made in the vacuum left by the original punk event horizon, it still suggests a certain style that arguably found its perfect form sometime in the eighties.

So while Vazum makes music that certainly tips its hat to those times and that scene, merely labelling it post-punk would be to undersell the creativity and inventiveness at work on their latest album, Western Violence. But then post-punk was a broad sonic church, allowing Vazum to thread all manner of associated sonics from those times through their music too, such as a gothic chill and shoegazing walls of sound, but also look to the present for additional influence, such as those found in the fringes of alternative rock and pop, and occasionally even wander into more metallic realms.

The result is an album of songs with one foot in the past, one in the present, one in the future and one in the unknown…there are two of them, after all. So, for every song like “Alien”, which echoes the dark gothic-pop of Souixsie and the Banshees you find the contemporary alt-pop ballad of “Done.” And for every searing, fist-in-the-air, infectious rock anthem such as “Get Out”, there is a track like “Nightshade”, which takes us into an intense but accessible doom-pop-metal place.

Western Violence is not the sound of the past, but you may very well recognise the sounds of your formative years here, especially if, like me, you have been around the rock block a few times. Instead, it is a modern band writing the most recent chapter of the post-punk story, a sonic story that refuses to die, which can only be a good thing. Right? Right!

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