Premier Rock Forum

Verbs and Nouns wrote:"My Sister The Cop's set was nothing if not loud as the home town boys raced through their chaotic set as usual. What seemed like a suitable support on paper turned out to sit slightly ajar alongside the Popfrenzy double. That's not to say that The Gossip and Pretty Girls weren't trashy (trashed?) and chaotic, they just pulled it off with a lot more style. Maybe it was because we'd seen My Sister The Cop about five times in the past month, or maybe they were lacking the feminine touch (or maybe they didn't drink as much whisky)."

I also realised how shit PGMG are that night.

glueman wrote:

Verbs and Nouns wrote:"My Sister The Cop's set was nothing if not loud as the home town boys raced through their chaotic set as usual. What seemed like a suitable support on paper turned out to sit slightly ajar alongside the Popfrenzy double. That's not to say that The Gossip and Pretty Girls weren't trashy (trashed?) and chaotic, they just pulled it off with a lot more style. Maybe it was because we'd seen My Sister The Cop about five times in the past month, or maybe they were lacking the feminine touch (or maybe they didn't drink as much whisky)."

I also realised how shit PGMG are that night.

I don't know what you guys sound like, but I like your band name a lot...also, you are correct, PGMG sucks...

Daniel Bush wrote:

Regrettably, here's a review that's to be written in the past tense: Seattle-bred Racetrack called it a day a few months back and, in an effort to leave no recordings unreleased, have left Go Ahead and Say It to their bummed out fans. This puts me in a pretty awkward position. I didn't even know Racetrack existed a week ago, and now I'm listening to a posthumous EP and drafting a piece that is certain to become a piece of the net's epitaph. To be sure, these kinds of dilemmas are things to be taken in stride; still, rarely are dead men condemned at their funerals.


But Racetrack is motioning for me to Go Ahead and Say It. To me, this whole thing - the band name, the album title (didn't the Starting Line use something like this a few years ago?) the production, the songwriting - smacks of the now-bygone pop-punk trends that dominated popular music a few years ago. I suppose Fallout Boy and Hawthorne Heights are still going at it and making a killing, but this takes me back to when Taking Back Sunday was the shit. Now, Racetrack are head-and-shoulders above any of these peers - it takes a noble band to tour sustainably for five years without any label support, let alone release a well-received full-length - but Go Ahead remains painfully elementary. Chris Walla of Death Cab produced the full-length that preceded this EP, and one can't help but think that, compared to that stalwart of the Seattle scene, this is insipid stuff.


There are those, however, who seem to really dig it. Part of the reason Racetrack made it as long as they did was the resolve of their fans, and I completely sympathize. These same fans will duly counter that I've grown completely out of touch with the music of my adolescence and what made it great, but I don't think this is the case. I mean, I still sneak in listens to Thursday and Saves the Day, if that counts for anything. "Jumping the Shark" can come to my defense: it begins like a Something Corporate song from back in the day while singer Meghan Kessinger laments "I should have known/ When you hadn't stopped smoking yet/ When my name's in the/ Wrong part of the alphabet/ When you live on Abbey Road/ But I was always a fan of Yoko." No need to worry about what she should have known or about grammatical inconsistencies, this is just dull. The instrumentation is lackluster as well: the band sounds like a trio on record, with very little elaboration on what amount to bald, colorless progressions of bass, guitar, and drums and an unimpressive attempt to replicate a live sound.


Enough. This is no requiem. Fans of Racetrack, buy this CD; it's the only thing you can do to memorialize a band you were into. Who knows? Maybe if enough CD sales result we could see a reunion show down the road somewhere. As it stands, by the looks of it there will be a few people in Seattle looking to start a band. Here's to you, Racetrack, and the hope that you never adopt the recidivism of your song title.

Germ War wrote:I think this wins for us, Courtesy of Razorcake:

STNNNG:
Self-titled: CD
As cryptic and as uninformative as this CD is: no clear track listing, hard
to read liner notes, etc, I will spare you these extreme injustices.