There’s a fine line between being a band influenced by a variety of styles and a band suffering from an identity crisis. In an attempt to grow up musically, Whitmore attempted to showcase the former, but sadly suffered from the latter. ‘Solstice Rise’ is a record that flicks between straight up pop punk songs (‘Too Long Too Late’), dubby-ska style tracks (‘Sober Days’) and shockingly appalling covers (‘Friday I’m In Love’). At least there’s no ‘Alison’ part two. On the face of it, ‘Solstice Rise’ will probably go on to emulate the success that ‘Smoke The Roach’ built up. After all, you don’t sell 12,000 records on a UK indie by accident, let alone be a punk band and sell that amount. No matter what you think of the band, or their music, that is a feat that commands respect. ‘Solstice Rise’ builds on the foundations the band had laid with their first album, taking the better parts and expanding on them. Suffice to say this is more musically and lyrically mature than their previous album. But, as I alluded to earlier, it does seem to suffer from a case of ‘what am I?’ syndrome.
The first three songs alone showcase Whitmore‘s new found apparent identity crisis. ‘Too Long Too Late’ is a decent pop song, ‘Sober Days’ sounds like a latter day Mad Caddies b-side, while ‘Promises’ is almost going down the emo route with a far more downbeat chord structure. Three songs and they could have been by three different bands. ‘Dim Blue Light’ and ‘Skunk#1’ even sound like Rx Bandits, to an extent. Now I’m all for bands trying to vary things up – variety is the spice of life after all – but it just sounds like Whitmore are still trying to find their sound. As a result, ‘Solstice Rise’ ends up as a collection of songs rather than an album; there’s no cohesion or a sense of glue that connects the songs together. Some of them probably shouldn’t be on the album at all – ‘Bad Intentions’ is poor anyway but never sits alongside ‘Side By Side’ in a million years, while Robert Smith will undoubtedly choke when he hears ‘Friday I’m In Love’, which is a soulless, emotionless piece of shit.
Lyrically Whitmore have never impressed me, I’ll be honest. The ‘singles’ from ‘Smoke The Roach’ were never going to win any prizes, so I was surprised to see that main songwriter Robb has certainly improved in this area. The subject matter doesn’t really break new ground mind, but there’s still a 100% improvement. Interestingly, ‘Side By Side’ contains a rather snide swipe at someone – “Can I take a second to decline/ Your views and your vicious lies/ Take a seat and think about what you do /‘cause you know that you might well die/ These are real fucking people with feelings like you/ Give me a second, I’ll lay down some proof/ I’ve got the truth and you can’t stand it yeah/ Well you had the time, to change your mind /Your hatred angers me, yeah.” Then on ‘October Ends’ Robb sings “You talk us up, to shoot us down/You can say what you want but you know we’ll always be around.” Maybe I’m way wide of the mark, but does this have anything to do with those Avril “rumours”?
If you liked Whitmore 18 months ago, then you’ll still probably like them. For me this is a big improvement on ‘Smoke The Roach’, a record I didn’t particularly like. Well, if I’m honest I thought it was complete shite. They’ve seemingly stopped the obvious lyrical nods towards promoting drug use and ‘grown up’ – and for me they are better for it. But at the same time there are just too many sides to Whitmore on show here and 16 songs is probably 5 too many. ‘Solstice Rise’ is better than I thought it was going to be, but it’s still not converted me.
Moon Ska Europe
Paul