Straight Lines

Persistance in the Game

By Dan Lester

Blame Fever Ray’s eerietronics or the bouncy synthpop of Miike Snow, but I always envisaged Sweden as a place where children would run around with synthesizers as hats and drumsticks for arms.

But alas, one of the most averagely-named bands of recent times brings us one of the most average albums of recent times, shattering my Scandanavian dream. Using their name as a template, their debut follows a familiar path of Billy Talent, Kids in Glass Houses et al, never veering from it. Guitars trundle along with forgettable riffs, the drums following with a passable amount of energy, but nothing we’ve never heard before.

The vocals reduce the whole thing from merely ‘OK’ to ‘pretty crap’; the majority of the tracks see the lead vocalist attempt a whiny faux-American accent. It’s a shame, because a couple of moments see him hint at being interesting, trembling charmingly, until he decides he’s being too stimulating and returns to his whiny comfort zone. Worse are the lyrics themselves, which read like a checklist of clichés and tenuous rhymes; if ‘Set Me on Fire and Feed Me to the Wolves’’s title doesn’t put you off, its opening line, “Where there’s a will there’s a way/Where theres a dawn there’s a day,” should give you a rough idea of the quality here.

The album was recorded in their mate’s basement, less in a DIY punk way, and more in the way that nobody seemed to want it to be recorded in the first place. Persistence… is the kind of record that will be of interest to precisely no one. Given what a hopelessly predictable affair it is, it’s only fitting I should end with this predictable pun: I rather hope Straight Lines don’t have Persistence in this Game. (2)