White Reaper - White Reaper Does It Again (Album Review)
Tuesday, 21 July 2015
Written by Huw Baines
Garage punk’s love affair with atmospherics is often a neat crutch, making it easy to sound the part while glossing over any missing hooks or recycled riffs. White Reaper ply their trade in such fuzzy confines, but their debut full length is a tumbling, gleeful wreck of melody and Ramones-meets-Ronettes style. Far from relying on trickery, ‘White Reaper Does It Again’ busts open some reverb-soaked affectations to get to the sugar rush of the songs within.
In finest punk tradition, the tracks collected here don’t hang around. A few break the three minute barrier, but most are content to charge out of the gate and smash through as many catchy refrains as possible before fucking off into the distance. I Don’t Think She Cares rattles along, with drummer Nick Wilkerson barely keeping things in check as Ryan Hater’s keys go haywire. It’s emblematic of the record’s greatest weapon: the ability to make some clever pop moves look ramshackle and off-the-cuff.
Wolf Trap Hotel plunges into its chorus before abruptly changing course into something even more satisfying, while the breezeblock guitars at the heart of Sheila can be as direct and heavy-handed as they want because the bridge is a scuzzy ball of melodic nous.
Amid the roar, Tony Esposito spits out trampled feelings, ruminates over near misses and grows isolated, staring at dead ends. Like so many before him, he packages up tangled emotions for mass consumption.
At surface level, White Reaper appear to be as straightforward as many of their retro-aping contemporaries, but their punchy missives are built on a rigid desire to see each song stand on its own feet. In that sense of attention to detail, they have the smarts of modern greats like the Marked Men, or much of the Dirtnap roster for that matter.
‘White Reaper Does It Again’ is a piece of precision pop engineering delivered by four kids with dirt under their fingernails; a killer box of singles corralled into a breakneck whole.
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