Retro Soup – EP

The Skinny: Some free noise for you all lovely people.

The review proper: Well, if the cliché about currents and trends repeating every 20 years is true (and sometimes it feels), then some bit of a throwback to the Industrial genre is due.

And that’s pretty true for Retro Soup’s first two songs, ‘Passive Aggression’ and ‘Crawl’, a one-two rope-a-dope of fuzziness and electronic malarkey. The former opens their free EP, the later goes for a very cool fuzzed-up guitar lick that makes you think of old black clothes and a bad night turning even worse.

But then the mood changes, swirling around a calm, centrepiece song called ‘Your mind is lost’. I don’t know if it’s the piano or the strange glitchy, sparse electronics, but it’s a pretty great pace changer, adding some curves to an EP. Cool beans, variety is always great.

On that line of variety, the rest of the EP (what’s with all these 5-song EPs as of late? Is it a sign of the Apocalypse?) goes again for the mental pace. ‘Truth in blood’ is all over the place and some ideas are good, but sometimes it feel like a mad remix that tries every trick in the book. ‘Fuckout’ finishes the album with a touch of class (and the reappearance of a guitar delivering some treats to our collective ears), going for a simple punk approach.

An interesting collection of songs. Click on the Last.fm in the links and check them out yourself if you want to listen to some electronic/rocky stuff. Won’t take more than 20 minutes and it’s as free as it comes (no e-mails/zipcode sorta thing).

—Sam

Links:

Myspace. Last.fm. Facebook. Twitter.