Timeshares

Bearable

Written by: PP on 13/03/2012 23:32:58

If the past few years have taught me anything, it's that there are a whoooole lot of small bands around who sound just like New York based Timeshares and vice versa. This group of bands being of course the entire generation of punk rockers who were influenced by the legendary Hot Water Music records, leading into all sorts of interpretations of their sound, some more roughened and hardcore rooted (Make Do And Mend, Nothington), others melodically ringing and gravelly (Daylight, Outsiders, The Great St. Louis), some punk oriented (Campaign, Ghost Robot Ninja Bear), and some more progressive than others (Basement, Daytrader). And this is just the top of the iceberg when it comes to beard wielding, Midwestern sounding Hot Water Music aspirants from around the world (but concentrated in the US). It's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish bands from one another to the extent that I'm starting to wonder whether the style is experiencing over saturation, something I never taught possible for my favorite genre.

Timeshares belong to the melodically ringing group, in that their guitars have that pleasant, high-end ring to them as the core ingredient of simple, but extremely effective melody lines. Like others before them, they rely on shouty, yet anthemic and sing-alongable vocals that are less about hooks than about down-to-earth attitude and pure, uncompromising honesty. The smooth bass lines provide the only breakaway from the gravelly melodies that are at the core of their sound, thus providing a little bit of contrast in what is otherwise a fairly typical, although still solid and halfway impressive expression.

You can tell they hold their Latterman records dear, so there's nothing particularly original at stake here. But that's okay. Timeshares make sure their melodies are always rock solid, and occasionally infectious, such as on "Chinese Coffee Torture", "Oh No Not That", "Woke Up In Grappler School" or "From An Admirer Not Darryl". It sometimes really feels that no band in this genre is able to write a bad record, even though we see few truly great ones in the same vein as, say, "Caution", or the Latterman records. The only problem, like I mentioned earlier, is how to tell the bands apart. They all fall into a similar sound and into a similar range on our rating scale, so I'll just leave you with this: where many bands leave you with a solid record with a couple of good tracks, Timeshares has just that little bit of extra in them to push them over the edge from being merely yet another band in the style into one that you should be checking out as one of the better examples within it.

Download: Oh No Not That, Chinese Coffee Torture, Woke Up In Grappler School
For the fans of: Latterman, Hot Water Music, Daylight, North Lincoln
Listen: Bandcamp

Release date 25.10.2011
Kiss Of Death Records / Kind Of Like Records

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