Album Review

The River Raid – Demo

• 29th Oct 2007

How refreshing it is to have a band not hailing from London, New York or Montreal. Recife’s The River Raid (that’s Brazil by the way) bring their heavy rock across to these shores using a mixture of their native tongue and their adopted Florida voice.

‘4:10 Local Time’ recalls the exuberance of the first couple of Hives records – confident, ballsy and bloody catchy.

‘Electric Kool’ is fuzzed up with distorted vocals and sounds like what those guys from The Mighty Boosh would have produced had they ever found “the sound”. Basically it sounds big, hairy and foreign and that’s never a bad thing. Well ok, sometimes it’s the worst of all things but thankfully on this occasion it works. It’s like a rawer, funkier Pearl Jam.

The softer numbers like ‘Let It Out’ don’t work anywhere near as well, but it doesn’t mater when you’ve got the insanely odd lyrics of the Arctic Monkeys-esque ‘Time Up’ such as “I’m sick, let’s get around. There’s beer around the corner. Get up. Stand up, now.”

This is big dumb rock of which they didn’t seem to make anymore. I’d forgotten how much fun it was.