No cover art available.

Sidearm – Don’t Cry Help Until You’re Dead (Archive.org)

The songs on this EP by British rockers Sidearm are great. That’s the theme of this review and, as I currently see it, most of the reviews I shall be doing from now on. I will also keep this as short as possible simply because if an album is good enough for me to review, the songs are going to be cohesive enough that describing every track would get repetitious. So here we go.

The tracks on ‘Don't Cry Help Until You're Dead’ start slow and tense, and build, build, build into wonderfully loud and crunchy walls of distorted noise. Instrumentally it often falls quite close to post-rock, with plenty of echoing, noodley guitar lines running through, but the songs are too impatient to truly sit comfortably in this genre. It sits, rather, between this and with the jarring noisy discontent of post-hardcore... I think.

The songs each rely on a slab of patience, not a lot but enough, to build the angular leads into powerful chord-driven stomps, before weaving back into lead-guitar and then finally building into a loud, angry climax. The vocals compliment this perfectly, ranging from tense to brooding, from nervously excited to dangerously frantic. This in turn is a pretty good summation of the moods that the songs themselves take you through. ‘Peach Garden’, by far the strongest track on the EP (or my favourite, take your pick), demonstrates everything brilliant about their noisy passages during the last minute and a half. Loud, vibrating riffs? Check. Violent bursts of vocals that pierce your skull with the same sentence over and over again? Check. A song stuck in your head for the next two weeks? Check.

The closing track ‘Victim Junkie’ uses the aforementioned layers of guitars along with layers of vocals to create an almost eerie feel to the song. It also features new elements, the use of piano and an effect that sound like wailing static, that expands upon their sound perfectly. The song that follows is tense and layered and pretty damn loud, as one would expect given the previous three hundred words. It’s incredibly disappointing that this band are on hiatus as I really would love to see this live.

Download 'Don't Cry Help Until You're Dead'