Review Summary: Fun, energetic and solidly crafted punk, Paper Arms comfortably fill the void left by bands abandoning the genre.
Hardcore-influenced punk rock has hit some hard times lately. With so many bands in the genre jumping the shark lately (Polar Bear Club, Title Fight etc), I’ve been left with a major craving for great music to come out in the genre. It turns out that Adelaide’s Paper Arms are the ones to fill that craving, as on
Great Mistakes they showcase some solid songwriting and energetic performances, despite lacking enough variation to stay interesting the whole listen through.
The band wastes no time showing what they’re all about, with opener
Dedication showing off the band’s synthesis of simple yet solid guitar parts with abrasive, grungy vocal delivery. It takes the songwriting approach of Shed-era Title Fight, and adds just a little bit more polish and coherence. While most of the tracks here follow this style, the band wear their influences on their sleeve throughout this album. For instance, while
You Don’t Speak for Me sounds like a fantastic Rise Against track (and is also a fantastic anti-Tony Abbott song), the chorus of
This Time could just as well have been written by Nirvana.
Vocally,
Great Mistakes features some fantastic yelled delivery, with frontman Josh Mann’s voice cracking all over the place across both his high and low register. While some people get annoyed by that type of delivery, and it does admittedly sound weird at first, Mann’s voice perfectly complements the frantic energy of some of these tracks. For instance, the track
Volumes has Mann growling through his low-mid register above fairly straight punk instrumentals that would be unexceptional with a flatter delivery. His mid-range growling voice adds more than enough energy to make this track a clear highlight.
Despite how much fun some of the tracks are on this album, most of highlights lie toward the start and middle of the album. In fact, the ending of the album is actually really weak. For instance, second-last track
Strings opens with a guitar line that sounds like it belongs in the bridge of a song you just want to be over, and runs with that riff all the way through the verses before entering a chorus I could have sworn I'd heard already on the album. I found myself wishing that
Great Mistakes had ended straight after
Volumes, which is right in the middle of the album. That being said, the last minute of closer
Factory Settings is great, but nowhere near great enough to redeem the entire last half of the album.
If you crave some solidly crafted post-hardcore/punk (like myself),
Great Mistakes absolutely provides. Paper Arms strike a fantastic balance between abrasive and accessible on this album, and put in such energetic performances it’s hard not to enjoy.
