X Is Loaded - 'Raw Nerve' (Music For Nations)
3/5
By: Matt Tomiak
'One of the hardest working bands on the rock scene' always has a faintly depressing ring to it. Often the calling-card of the heavy-gigging, yet terminally average, it's a phrase whose inclusion amongst the publicity notes for X Is Loaded's debut album causes trepidation with rockfeedback.
Fortuitously, 'Raw Nerve' is an album to banish those toilet circuit blues. As the name might suggest, it's a jagged, hungry, supremely confident debut album in the vein of 'Definitely Maybe', or more recently, the wall-of-sound convulsions of The Cooper Temple Clause's 'See This Through & Leave'.
Opener 'Zero' recalls Jane's Addiction in both Jake Robertson's sky scraping vocals and mysteriously-named guitarist Martino's Dave Navarro-esque guitar heroics. Before, bizarrely turning into Radiohead's 'Fake Plastic Trees' for the last minute-and-a-bit.
The likes of 'The Start of Everything' and 'Roll On', elsewhere, position the band alongside new-wave post-rockers like Oceansize. Then there's the momentous, debauched swagger of 'Thirteen Days'; think Muse if they retained the gobsmackingly grandiose ambition, but ditched paranoid paeans to alien invasion in favour of good old fashioned, f**k off rock n' roll tunes.
'Raw Nerve' may be their first LP, yes, but on 'Raw Nerve' the Bath foursome already sound pretty damn epic.
Artists in this article: X Is Loaded
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