Shield Your Eyes ought to be admired for their continuing insistence on awkwardness. This trio sneak enough deliberately unpredictable tempo changes and discordant attempts at melody into 'Volume 4' to make some lovers of traditional rock music weep. Shield Your Eyes are determined not to make life easy for their listeners with their incorporation of influences from the disparate worlds of jazz, blues and noise rock. Frankly at times in their career such experimental blending has led to something disappointingly incomplete but, thankfully, 'Volume 4' is almost all hit and very little miss.
The highlight is undoubtedly the fantastic 'Until I Find a Natural Way' which, placed as it is towards the end of the second third of the album, sees Shield Your Eyes take the tortured vocal shredding style of Kurt Cobain at his best and mix it up with surprisingly soaring math rock guitar alongside a delightfully busy rhythm section.
Not only is it experimental rock music at its best but it is also extremely catchy, although not quite so much as 'You Merit High Hopes', which sounds like the sort of thing Sonic Youth unfortunately forgot how to write consistently a few years back. The gentle acoustic nature of 'Glad' provides another undoubted strong moment, especially as it completely fails to build into something far more threatening and loud as one may expect.
There are the odd moments of faltering indecisiveness however, stopping 'Volume 4' from becoming something truly spectacular. 'Drill Your Heavy Heart' could certainly be accused of meandering a little and 'Schutze Deine Augen' being included as the final track comes across as perhaps a little bit of an over-indulgence.
For the most part though, Shield Your Eyes have got things bang on with this release. This is a band that has learnt how to control their more avant-garde tendencies and merge them with their, long too underrated, songwriting skills to create something that is both thought-provoking and highly listenable.
'Volume 4' is out now via Function Records.
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