Album Reviews
Do you like Sweden? And solid tunes? And Marked Men? Radioactivity? If the answer to all those questions is yes, then you are going to be very happy you got to know Ditches. Hell, even if you don’t like Sweden, you are going to need their debut album in your life. Trust me on this one.
On their self-titled full-length, these guys blast through eleven songs worth of highly melodic and garage-y pop-punk meets power pop goodness. Now, I mentioned Marked Men before and sure, there is plenty of Denton’s finest to be found on songs like opening track ‘Out Of This’, ‘Get Away’ and ‘Stitch Me Up’. Hell, Jeff Burke even produced the album and helped out with some backing vocals. But dismissing Ditches as a mere copycat would be cutting them short. They simply wear their influences on their sleeves but instead of getting stuck at the worship phase, they ended up writing songs that probably had Burke wondering why he hadn’t come up with them himself.
Ditches not only have a knack for writing the catchiest of melodies, they also succeed beautifully in spicing them up with solid riffs, fast-paced rhythms and punchy basslines that stumble and crash into one another and somehow make the whole thing even sweeter. I mean, songs just don’t get better than ‘Did We Try’, the surf-inflected ‘Don’t Care’ or the grand finale that is 'Rosy Cheeks'.
Track listing:
- Out Of This
- Did We Try
- Get Away
- In Disguise
- Stitch Me Up
- Shelter
- Lights Out
- Falling
- Don't Care
- When It's Over
- Rosy Cheeks
Lacking the talent to actually play in a band, Tom decided he would write about bands instead. Turns out his writing skills are mediocre at best as well.
