Sullem Voe - All Naked Flames
Being outspoken can be a valuable tool in the music industry nowadays. Too much music in the modern pop chart is sung by artists without more than a thought between them. Often if they do voice an opinion, it has been bandied around a corporate boardroom beforehand, brain-stormed over to ensure that its delivery will cause maximum exposure for the artist and will trigger a some sort of publicity boom. Artists have, over the years, been whittled down by record companies to ensure that they don’t make any unexpected faux pas and do some damage to record sales, or touring revenue. The biggest stars will get sent to classes for how to deal with the press, and what can be said to endear and audience to an act.
This is a sad world we live in, and something has to be done... But then, someone will come along and prove the PR companies right. Artists have egos. And there is no telling how much damage a large ego can do to a bands reputation, especially when the band is relatively unknown and have no right to sing about their unproven brilliance from the rooftops.
One little browse through Sullem Voe’s website, and never before has this seemed more apparent:
“Sullem Voe is a project for musical experimentation. A counterweight against all the soulless, hollowed out, homogenized and inescapable noise that masquerades as music”
OK, fair enough, so let’s hear ya!
Ah, well that’s where the problems start. A quick list of musical comparisons may draw up Biffy Clyro, Porcupine Tree or even Soulwax, but what all of these bands have in common is that at their core they build around a structure of straight forward rock music and then give their own special twist. Well that’s what Sullem Voe do too, but they’ve forgotten the twist. ‘The Lonely Planet’ is a promising opener, with programmed beats and hint a of Radiohead experimentation over more formulaic rhythm’s, but from that point it’s all bland straight forward rock music.
Another snippet from the website tells us that...
“The songs on ‘All Naked Flames” explore themes such as the nature of identity, duplicity, greed and moral corruption. Grown-up stuff doesn’t have to mean boring.... Love songs? Now, that IS boring.”
Now question marks appear over who this statement is directed towards. It’s ironic that they could make such a patronising comment like “grown-up stuff doesn’t have to be boring” and then deliver such a tedious selection of tracks. And who said grown-up stuff was boring?? It seems that Sullem Voe have a pretty low opinion of who their target audience might be, that they would feel comfortable patronising them like this.
The sad fact is that here is a band, with little, or nothing original to offer the music scene, (which if you look in the right places is actually full to the brim with exciting talent at the moment) and attacked it, and its fans with an average album and a naive attempt to bully people into thinking that they have been wrong all this time.
‘All Naked Flames’ is not album, by any means, and fans of the artists listed above may find some surprises in here, mainly in the shape of ‘Fresh Hell’. But it still seems it’s time for Sullem Voe to pick up that phone and call a PR expert in quick before too much damage is done.