Sometimes I feel like a vet. No, I don’t have to put my hand up a cow’s arse, but I do feel like the poor guy standing over a limp animal waiting to administer the injection which will put said pooch/cat out of it’s lifeless misery. I think people assume I enjoy putting bands down or slagging them off, but I don’t at all. I’d much rather listen to, and write about, something catchy, fun and exciting. It’s so much easier – and more enjoyable. On the whole, most records we get sent result in some kind of positive reaction. However, the minority make me want to pull out the needle…
Scarlet Thoughts are just plain old rubbish. They’re a young band and so it’s difficult to be too harsh, but listening to this record really didn’t improve my early morning mood. ‘?’ sounds like it was recorded in a bathroom – with the toilet flushing – but that wouldn’t be so bad if the vocalist didn’t sound like a bag full of drowning cats. He can’t sing, at all – plain and simple. It’s so excrutiatingly bad that I had to skip the first two songs after 15 seconds. It was difficult to go back and listen again. Everything is incredibly basic, from the riffs to the drum patterns – meaning the only advice I can give is to go back to the drawing board, get a new singer and start again. If Scarlet Thoughts is an outlet for having fun, then I hope the boys in the band enjoy expressing themselves. But if they have hopes and dreams of playing arenas to throngs of pre-teens, all chanting their names, the dream is a hell of a long way off…
www.scarlet-thoughts.co.uk
paul