See You at 7 by The Stringers
Like a long night at the bar, but with more dancing and less regret.
The danger of reviewing your friend’s band is that, well, they’re your friend. You don’t want to put them down or bash their work, even if their stuff sounds identical to the cellphone memo recordings you used to make while lying sick in bed and pretending you were actually the lead singer of your favourite angsty pop-punk band doing a radio interview. And when I was originally handed this EP, I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t expecting much more than that. The hand-written track listing on the back, the cheap sticker on the CD face, the pre-bent corners from spending too many nights in a jacket pocket while crowdsurfing at student bars — it all screamed garageband effort and quality and made me afraid to listen to it, let alone review it. After all, how do you let someone down lightly?
However, after a lightning-fast rip through the 20 minute runtime, a sense of relief immediately washed over me. Not because I could easily consider this record a write-off and pretend I never listened to it, but because it was actually good, and I wanted to publicly review it. The sketchy packaging doesn’t do the music inside any justice — from the first few plucks of Dresses and Ties right through the end of the tracklisting, every song was expertly mastered (at least for my shitty MacBook speakers). The intermingling guitars driven along by the driving rhythm create a cohesive unit that feel just as tight as an Arkells record — one of the band’s greatest (and most obvious) influences. It also puts you in the mood that the title deceptively conveys: the first couple of songs are honest-to-goodness dance-alongs that fluidly transition into late-night ballads to scream along to while driving alone. Just like if you got to the club at 7 but decided to stick around once the band on the crummy stage started laying down the tunes and your drinks finally arrived at the table.
Admittedly some of the lyrics were cliché enough to only want to repeat while drunkenly hollering along, but does that really take away from the enjoyment of the music behind it? In either case, this record has the kind of sound that makes me want to hear and jam along to live, and definitely has the staying power to put The Stringers onto my iTunes library, if not my watch list. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of growth these cute little Kanata kids can come up with.
Verdict: Don’t let the inexperience of the band or the length of the EP fool you, because everybody’s gotta start somewhere. This is a quick adventure that’s well worth the time for any indie rock fan.
