Giving Chase
A Cheap Print of a Masterpiece
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Next door to the emo/screamo metallically melodic hotbed that is New Jersey, Philadelphia’s Giving Chase strive to prove to the world that Pennsylvania is more than Amish country. Taking the formula perfected by bands like Lifetime and Thrice, these guys seek to find the balance between hardcore screams and emotive sing/song. Have they found it? Not quite, but they have ironically made quite a nice facsimile of one with A Cheap Print of a Masterpiece.
Some of these songs are tight enough (“While Nero Played,” “Wrecked Angle”), but they fall into the same trap as so many of their peers; bland aggression watered down by the vocalist’s attempt to show some heart.
Take the angry explosion that is “Acceleration Couch,” brutal poetry gets screamed, “So mark our front door, strike it with a red x/ cut the power, the phone lines, and the oxygen/ Nobody lives here anymore, look inside, everybody’s dead” and very quickly gets weakened by a deflated whine of equally poetic words “In the path of disaster, we forge new destinies/ These are the last rites of spite, give hours and hours after midnight/ All sold out of compromise, in the cross hairs with closed eyes.” This schizophrenic vocal play is then bookended by another closing burst of power, “All potential, no kinetic going shot for shot with pathetic/ And we swallow the struggle, but we come up empty again and again.”
What’s disappointing about Giving Chase is that musically and lyrically they are really quite good. Someone just needs to tell them that they are better than just another screamo band.
Giving Chase: http://www.givingchase.com
