Waking up in a haze of guilt, filth and shame as you attempt to piece together last night’s booze-ridden antics is unpleasant at the best of times. Throw Manchester’s Oaths into the fray with their debut EP Stag Party and you’ll be begging for a dose of co-codamol and a neuralyzer.
Stag Party is not likely to lift the dull thick fog amassing in your head. The generic riffs of opener ‘Another Lover’ are a reminder of the shot that took you over the edge. Treading on familiar ground with run-of-the-mill chugs and breakdowns, Oaths cast out feelings of been there done that and got the tattoo to prove it.
It’s the scream/clean formula that really makes you wonder – like waking up in a pool of your own vomit for the second weekend running – how you can’t see the pattern emerging quickly enough to make essential tweaks.
The 5-piece have an uncanny knack of sounding like Deaf Havana (when they first began) and We Are The Ocean (before they sacked their screamer). It’s not necessarily a bad thing. From the technical licks and melodic build up of ‘Idols/Rivals’ that reaches a delicious crescendo to the bullish, at times frantic ‘Hank Moody’ which is more infectious than the conveyor belt of drugs and women found on Californication.
By the time ‘I Am The Danger’ shows up, like a copper while relieving yourself at an ATM machine, why now springs to mind. In Oaths case it’s why the wait. This has swag, grimy riffs played at a preposterous pace, exposing what Oaths have threatened to do since the beginning.
At times Stag Party is a chaotic bundle of coarse vocals and the sweet syrup to sooth. But as finding out you have a permanent marker outline of a penis on your face as a result of falling asleep to soon, it’s not as entertaining as it should be and lacks originality.
