Review – Faker demo CD
This is a CD I have had for a while and with thanks to the clever press kit it is one I have been looking forward to hearing. But, as with the review of their gig at the Hopetoun the other night, even when I sat down to listen to the record one thing or another kept me from writing it, but more than an hour later I was able to sit down, critique the disc, and get it down for posterity.
Faker are a young five-piece from in and around Sydney
who are described as making complex music for complex people. The background of
the band is just as multifarious, involving 18 people in the line-up along,
which brings the Spinal
Tap phenomenon to real-life!
Nathan Hudson hails from somewhere in the northern British Isles and brings with him to the basis of the band, which includes bass-man Paul Youdell, a somewhat Brit-pop influence. That influence is credited to The Smiths, New Order, Blur and The Cure but in there too is something of that socialist larrikin Billy Bragg (I Know/She Knows, Gun) that can’t be ignored, and more probably some Lydon/Scabies (Channel Alex) and Weller/Jam (Touchdown, Enough) as well. But mix in there some contemporary raw-Strat or Tele sounds so popular on the Australian scene: ergo Jebediah, Velvetine; and you’d pretty much have it!
Faker are ‘an interesting little band’ with ‘oodles of potential’ as street publications and the aforementioned press kit have mentioned… it’s not a clever thing to take something that someone else has said because you have run out of ideas, but when it sums up what you have found to be the case from a what you have seen in one gig and one CD, why come up with something different!? ««««