Dublin may just be the site of a full-on skacore revival. Okay, maybe not but there is a little activity there right now. Last month The Upgrades dropped a debut album of third wave tunes and this month it’s the turn of Chewing on Tinfoil, a quintet that is far from just a rehash of Reel Big Fish. Indeed, this debut album has a lot of promise about it.
‘Get Rich or Try Dyin” sits right between the poppy ska of Less Than Jake and the more serious Jamaican tones of The Slackers. In terms of bed partners you’d be hard pushed to find a better comparison than Streetlight Manifesto. The big difference though is that Chewing on Tinfoil doesn’t use brass. Instead there’s a reliance on keys and guitars. The result tends to be some real galloping numbers that are interspersed with heavier instances. ‘Piece Apart’ has a decent heavy beatdown towards its conclusion, whilst ‘Dancefloor’ is two minutes full of, well, dance floor bothering Mad Caddies style up-tempo skanking.
There’s a smidgen of experimental moments across the record (‘Westys Awesome Intro’ is a sweet piano interlude) which adds to a distinctiveness already generated by the fact that the vocals actually sound Irish. No SoCal aping here. You get the sense that it’s the sum of a lot of years, a lot of changes and a real search for what the band should sound like. That’s also where this album hits the wall. According to the band, “these 17 tracks account for the last three years of song writing and gigging.” Three years is a long time for a band with a lot of room for evolution and change, and the result is that this feels like an album in two parts.
Tracks 1 to 10 feel like an album proper. Track 10 (‘Rot & Decay’) sounds like a real album closer. The tracks that follow feel more like a series of banded together individual offerings. ‘Duck Proof Intro’ is merely a live interlude whereas ‘Littlefoot’ is an interesting digression into almost InMe territory. It’s not ska, it’s radio-friendly rock, and actually sounds good for it. The same could be levelled at ‘I Rarely Relate’ too. It’s probably a case of the band trying to pile everything in to the record, not wanting to crop any of those hard-worked songs. It probably could do with a bit of a trim but ultimately it’s not that much of a deterrent and even with 17 tracks the album length still clocks in at a very manageable 44 minutes.
As far as third wave ska albums go, this is a decent enough offering that benefits from having an identity of its own. Whilst it’s not completely original it does have enough about it to get a shoulder up on the competition. Saying that, if Chewing on Tinfoil is to survive another three years it would probably be best to start hunting for that X factor that will transfer the bands status from enjoyably accessible to vital.
Alex