Juno - Counting Backwards Causes Explosions
Counting Backwards Causes Explosions is an ambitious title for an EP, and sadly not one that Juno manage to live up to. The countdown introduction to the first track, Take Me Home, is unoriginal and doesn't work particularly well, including the fact that it's simply much longer than it needs to be. Not only that, but it's a slightly literal take on the title - more explosions, less counting, please!
Take Me Home, countdown aside, has a few moments of drum backing before everything else kicks into overdrive - or attempts to. The screaming vocals aren't exactly unpleasant, but screams as vocals are something that are decidedly difficult to get right. There still needs to be something engaging about it, some form of melody, and the only melody here appears to be contrived and disappointing.
The tracks also aren't particularly distinctive, despite the fact that they also lack a sense of cohesion - they seem to have been put together individually with no regard for what follows. The one potential stand-out is final track Forgive Me - uninspired track name aside, there's a hint of something better. If they'd spent more time on it paring down the dead weight, so to speak, something much better could have emerged. Sadly, they didn't.
The remaining two songs suffer from equally vague titles; The Vision and The Progress. There is a resounding feel that there could have been something great there, but it continually slips out of reach and hides behind the squealing guitars and raw vocals. The hints of angst are the more honest moments, when Juno don't seem preoccupied by the image they're trying to get across.
This is Juno's third EP, so it's difficult to understand why they don't seem to have found their sound by now. There's too much going on around it - too much of everything, guitars, noise - leading the actual music to become lost. The production, at least, is impressive - if not the music.
Counting backwards causes explosions, apparently. As previously mentioned, we have the counting backwards - but the listener is left waiting for the explosions.