Action Action - Don't Cut Your Fabric To This Year's Fashion
Rating
RIYL
The CureDepeche Mode
The Killers
Clear Static
Label
Victory RecordsTracklist
1. This Year's Fashion2. Drug Like
3. Photograph
4. Basic Tiny Fragments
5. Bleed
6. Instructions on Building a Model Airplane
7. A Simple Question
8. Eighth Grade Summer Romance
9. Let's Never Go To Sleep
10. Broken
11. Four-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle
12. Don't Cut Your Fabric
13. The Short Week Begins With Longing
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Everything comes and goes in cycles. The 80s were a decade of music evolution and revolution. We saw the rise of pop music as we know it today with Madonna leading the way to Britney Spears. There were the hair metal/glam rock bands, who two decades later, bands like The Darkness have learned from and there was new wave. Bands like The Cure, Depeche Mode, Joy Division and others leading the way. Today a whole new crop of bands have picked up their torch and one of those bands is Victory Record's Action Action. The band is the spawn of two defunct Victory bands, Count The Stars and The Reunion Show, but their direction is completely different from their formers.
"Don't Cut Your Fabric To This Year's Fashion" is a solid debut for Action Action. They take elements of rock, new wave and punk and throw it together to bring a sound that is part dance beat, part guitar riffs, part synth noise and part Mark Thomas Kluepfel's brooding voice. The songs run the gamit from straight punk, to Motion City Soundtrack-esque moog pop, to total new wave, which is what they do best. Songs like "Drug Like" and "Lets Never Go To Sleep" play like the radio stations when I was in elementary school. Pulsing dance beats, crunchy guitar and that "Am I going to start crying any second" voice. There are few pop rock gems too. "Eight Grade Summer Romance" and "Photograph" are some of the year's best pop songs.
My biggest problem with this album is that at times Mark Thomas Kluepfel tries too hard with his vocals. He sounds too much like his forefathers sometimes. It almost like he thinks he must emulate Robert Smith and his contemporaries. Other times, he tries for the whole "screaming" thing. Screaming vocals and new wave do not mix, it just sounds weird. There is a time and place for that kind of thing, and this is not it. My advice for Kluepfel is to just be yourself, there is no need to try and match voices with anyone.
While there are some real stinkers on this record, they are far outnumbered by the gems. There are at least 6 or 7 songs that will have you dancing, pretty good for a band's debut, in a genre that hasn't really been practiced in two decades.
JohnnyL
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