The Blood Arm - Suspicious Character (City Rockers)
1/5
By: Chris Pratt
For some time now this Los Angeles foursome have managed to get by on the fact that they are (or were, at some point) Franz Ferdinand's favourite band - a tag which certainly helped kick-start their career - but it seems they've decided that it's about time they made a conscious effort to leave the comfort of said Scots' adoration and strike out on their own.
'Suspicious Character' is undoubtedly a blatant bid to push The Blood Arm from being a band's band into the upper echelons of the mainstream indie circuit - subtlety is something you won't find a shred of over these three minutes and sixteen seconds. 'I like all the girls, and all the girls like me' hollers Brandon Flowers, sorry I mean Nathaniel Fregoso - a brazenly memorable yet ultimately vacant line which is repeated incessantly over that ubiquitous alt-disco shuffle that someone should have trademarked a long time ago.
Clearly aiming to emulate the artful stomp of something like 'Take Me Out' but lacking anything approaching that song's irresistible irreverence, 'Suspicious Character' comes across more like a desperate attempt at a chart-friendly single, essentially a pastiche of older records by better bands. The only possible point of interest is their lack of a bass guitarist, pianist Dyan Valdés instead providing some attractive low end textures which deserve to be exploited further, but instead are buried beneath repetitive post-Strokes guitar lines.
Artists in this article: The Blood Arm
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