Saturday Night Gym Club - How To Build A Life Raft (EP Review)
Thursday, 01 March 2012
Written by Tim Cox
As a band starting out, everyone is looking to attach a label to you. Once appropriately tagged you can be neatly packaged up and sent off to market. The snag is, when you become affiliated with one genre it becomes less acceptable to experiment with others. Saturday Night Gym Club seem determined to avoid such a fate; ‘How To Build A Life Raft’, their debut EP guides the listener down ambient, pop, glitch, modern and eighties avenues adeptly dodging gaping pigeonholes along the way.
Title track ‘How To Build A Life Raft’ is a flawless 80’s style pop diamond; gliding along amiably through verses on a carpet weaved from atmospheric strings and melancholic vocals, elevated skywards when the outrageously feel good synth line chimes in for the chorus. The EP’s second track ‘Green Light’ is also constructed around this same template; a style not dissimilar to Australian electro outfit Cut Copy, which is by no means an insult- if you like Cut Copy, you’ll like this.
Lead single ‘I know’ is a cavernous, sub aquatic soundscape propelled by the voice of elfin folk pop artist Ellie Walker. Stretched out, glitched up and drenched in reverb, Ellie’s delicate vocals are replicated and her pitch is expertly manipulated to harmonise with herself. It sounds as if she is a haunting and ethereal, half-human half-electronic instrument. Set initially at a meditative tempo, the song picks up pace and intensifies as percussion is steadily added. Moody and atmospheric but with a twinkle and a kick ‘I Know’ stands out from many other cut and paste female vocal + sub bass hits. It is a thinking man’s dubstep.
The second half of the EP is more introspective. ‘The ballroom scene’ marries waves of strings and piano whilst tossing out lyrical imagery of suitably grand scale to fit the sonic experience - ‘From up here I can see the curvature of the earth’. This is music to have chemically induced faux epiphanies to, if that’s your kind of thing. Further exhibiting SNGC as more than capable of delivering an emotive, larger, more epic sound is final track; the beautiful and purely instrumental ‘Lituya Bay’. Lead by classical arrangements of violin and piano with the eventual addition of contemporary drums and bass; this is chillout handled with the mature restraint of a band with years of experience rather than one that has only just begun to tap into the extent of their capabilities.
It is to Saturday Night Gym Club’s credit that they hold back when they could go straight for the jugular, they create music that is more subtle and more intelligent than a lot of run of the mill dance acts. They shrewdly avoid all out blissful or catchy choruses in favour of more subtle slow growers. Maybe at points ‘How To Build A Life Raft’ could benefit from a touch more lyrical depth, but either way there is no fighting the warm and comforting synthetic feeling that Saturday Night Gym Club have dubbed their signature sound - ‘an electric blanket for the soul’.
‘How To Build A Life Raft’ is a solid debut filled with promise. Listening to it is a wholesome, life affirming, restorative experience; it should be prescribed as a cure all ailments remedy on the NHS.
How To Build A Life Raft is out March 5th.
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Title track ‘How To Build A Life Raft’ is a flawless 80’s style pop diamond; gliding along amiably through verses on a carpet weaved from atmospheric strings and melancholic vocals, elevated skywards when the outrageously feel good synth line chimes in for the chorus. The EP’s second track ‘Green Light’ is also constructed around this same template; a style not dissimilar to Australian electro outfit Cut Copy, which is by no means an insult- if you like Cut Copy, you’ll like this.
