1. Of Our Lives
2. Snakecharm the Dead Whale
3. Syncopated Heartbeat
4. Warship Lanterns

I’ve always loved that poppy post-hardcore sound of bands like Silverstein, Circa Survive and the like, but are Avosetta sufficiently unique enough to produce something that differentiates them from the swathes of bands producing this stuff through the past decade? Well, no not really. Does it matter? Not to me it doesn’t. A good friend once said to me during our formative years of discovering good music “The good thing about liking punk music is that there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll like pretty much all punk music”. There’s obvious exceptions to this of course (which have become very apparent during my years as a reviewer), but generally it’s nice to be able to like almost a complete genre of music and many of its sub-genres and related genres.

Avosetta do what they do well, and wear their influences on a sleeve of post-hardcore pastiche. Complex lyrical structures and disjointed melodies remind me of Panic at the Disco and the softer parts of the vocals have a tone like Jimmy Eat World. All this is skilfully layered over heavy but tonal metally riffs, almost constant lead guitar lines to create a complex but listenable texture and interspersed with some intense screams to add a harder edge to the music, resulting in a combination of sounds that has been heard many, many times before, but there’s no real point in re-inventing the wheel arbitrarily.

There’s no point in pretending this is ground-breaking, but there’s great skill in the performance, song-writing, nice production and the structures of each track build up and break down at just the right moments. In short, if you’re into this kind of thing, there’s a good chance you’ll probably be into this.

http://www.myspace.com/avosetta