With a band name like Fawn Spots and album title like From Safer Place, you can’t blame us for expecting a modern-day, hip indie band. On the contrary what we found was a punk hardcore trio who has been making their rounds playing shows in sweaty, mangy pubs across the country. If the underground punk scene is your forte, chances are you might have run into them over the past couple of years.
In between shows, the band managed to lock themselves away in sheds located in an abandoned Georgian garden outside their hometown of York to record their debut album. In maintaining their DIY ethic, the album was recorded and engineered by the band themself, and as a result it clearly represents everything these guys are about.
Right off the bat, Fawn Spots come charging at you with a bludgeon. Knowing no limits, the album sees a constant battle between instruments as their individual outpours of energy try to outdo each other. Blasting riffs and visceral yelps are aplenty, meshing into a compact portrayal of angst.
But of course, every album has got the obligatory “lighter” material, whether it is the soft interludes in ‘A Certain Pleasure’ or ‘Black Water’, or the instrumental ‘In Front of the Chestnut’. These aspects do create that extra dimension (and not to mention, it sounds great), but there is no denying that it’s when they’re playing to the loudest of their abilities that the band are most in their element.
Fawn Spots is pure energy with no sign of slowing down. There’s clearly a vast amount of potential from the young band. There’s nothing half-assed about From Safer Place and is the perfect way to introduce the band to the scene.
