run,WALK!
I Hope This All Works Out So I Can Stop Standing On Even Amounts Of Manholes In The Street

After numerous listens of this debut mini-album by Run, Walk!, this much we know:

1. They’re fucking exciting. Now that’s not something you can say about your average band, but there are so many ideas and styles kicking around on this lengthily titled but blisteringly energetic 18 minute record that it’s hard to keep up or form a coherent overview of where they sit as a act.

2. At first it all seems like a bit of a mess, truth be told, but with each subsequent listen every song begins to wield more and more ‘mini-movements’ to adore; like the HEALTH-esque juxtaposition of the melodic indieness and the terrifying heavy metal assault that overtakes your senses a minute into ‘N.B.Y.’.

3. The aforementioned combination of styles means that if your idea of heaven is to hear Lightning Bolt mixed with Oceansize or Part Chimp mutated with Jaguar Love then you’re in for a treat. ‘Trees are Raw’ in fact sounds like all four of these bands at various points, and yet at the same time entirely like none of them.

4. The one thing that unites the entire record is the howled vocals of Matthew Pickering-Copley. It’s what I imagine a young father would sound like if, after four days of waterboard torture, you held a gun up to his young daughters head and asked him for his thoughts on the matter; a bizarre mixture of anger, fragility and sheer unpredictability.

5. ‘Horizons’ has a wonderfully deep, bass heavy noise running through its entirety. You probably know the kind of reverberation I mean. One of the best features of I Hope This All Works Out… is how deep and rich it sounds, yet how frentic and raw it stays. It’s what Los Campesinos! or one of those many American college rock bands should sound like given the reviews about how loud they are, but which they rarely manage to capture on record. These guys really don’t have that problem…

6. Their artwork and website is wicked.

7. This isn’t a great record as such. It’s more a tease of a future belter featuring some brilliant songs and a few potential live favourites. But as a snapshot of what the band could feasibly achieve, it’s a vivid and mouth-watering glimpse of an extremely exciting proposition indeed.