"The entire E.P. was pretty influenced by the '90s: Shuggie Otis, The Beatles, Weezer and Dinosaur Jr. are some honourable mentions," when asked to describe the incentive to record the London, Ontario self-titled debut. "Guitar pedals, especially our beloved fuzz pedal, were also a big influence."
The grunge revival of a few years ago was short-lived, missing out on a lot of the potential threads and sonic strains of the Seattle sound. Grunge was basically '80s college/jangle pop, a la R.E.M. or Big Star, run through a woolen sweater filter of Big Muffs and half-stacks, bringing metal's technicality and force with punk's ferocity, speed and "don't give a shit" attitude. Grunge was de-fanged in its nascent state, thanks to a huge influx of marketing dollars looking to cash in on the next Nirvana sound-alike. Amazing bands, like Dinosaur Jr., were rushed to push out generic, cookie cutter radio rock, releasing albums which are still clogging the aisles of shoddy used record stores like poisonous weeds to this day. It takes a lot of work to make an inferior product out of superior ingredients, and each of these genres had a lot of great things going for it. Add in a little bit of proto-shoegaze, goth and post-punk, and sometimes we have to wonder what went wrong with grunge in the first place. It doesn't matter. Hamish Patterson is here to set the record straight, rearranging Grunge's genome in new and interesting ways on their self-titled album Hamish Patterson. All of the things we love about fuzzy '90s rock are present - the soaring, squealing guitar solos, like the ferocious outré of "Severed Minds" or the solid, stomping beats of "Not With You" recorded on a gigantic drum set the size of a small mountain range at WallFlower Studios in London, Ontario. There's the weird, gloopy, phased out psychedelia, like album opener "Croatian Corvette" and, of course, that sweet, sweet jangle! Hamish Patterson takes us back to a time before everyone in the world knew who Television were, when psychedelic solos played with punk intensity and post-punk precision elicited awe instead of yawns. They also remind us how weird and wonderful a lot of those indie gems were, reminding us of the joys of crate-digging musical discovery. For sycophants who want to rock, for metalheads who want to get weird, for classic rockers tired of the classics, dig into Hamish Patterson now!
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