Review Summary: The average Rabbit Junk release, which means it's great.
Four months ago when Rabbit Junk released the “Pop That Pretty Thirty” EP, JP Anderson stated that another one was already at work. The band hadn’t seen so much activity in half a decade and now that we are four months later and “Invasion” has been released a question arises: How long before we get to hear some new Rabbit Junk now ?
The wide variety of genres and type of songs tackled by the band makes it even more noticeable that new material doesn’t come too often. You need to be extremely addicted to a band like Unearth not to be satiated with one of their filled-with-eleven-similar-(great)songs album but if you listen back to back to the fourteen tracks that Rabbit Junk has released since their last album in 2009 (which like the previous one was more of a compilation of three EPs) you can probably spot something like eight different approaches. This doesn’t mean that the band lacks an identity, each released new song is stamped Rabbit Junk all over it, but that all of this is very frustrating. Will we ever hear something like “the boy with the sun in his eyes” again ? (Even though it’s not the band’s most popular track it’s still excellent) Or something as epic as “Precipice” ? The little representation in their catalogue of tracks of each approach the band explores makes it all the more frustrating when one of them lead to an astonishingly great song (which will never be replicated) or on the contrary to a not so great one.
Of course we should never lose sight of the fact that the main problem behind all this is that the band is great. But this is not said for no reason. Sasha Konietzko once stated that because of the popularity of songs like “a drug against war” or “Juke Joint Jezebel” KMFDM regularly “had to” replicate them in order to please/appease the fans. When listening to “Thug Baby” on “Invasion” older material from Rabbit Junk springs to mind: Ghetto Blasphemer I & II. It’s been a long time since we’ve been treated with a taste of JP Anderson’s brand of death metal and Amelia Arsenic’s ominous performance, as great as it is, has something frustrating to it simply because it is not exactly what we crave for. A more real problem with the song is that that wonderful lyricist seems to have been worked through the “subverting the masses one catchphrase at a time” approach of glitchmode recordings and that her words lack a bit of her usual subtlety. Anyway, “Thug Baby” is a bulldozer of a song that will have you gasp for breath and curl up in a corner of your room, which is certainly what they were aiming for.
Another nicely oppressive track on the EP is the self-titled opener with its throbbing beats (reminiscent of The Shizit’s “Audio Jihad II”), its heavy guitars, its harsh, harrowing vocals and its beautifully emotional chorus. There isn’t much to say about this song apart from the fact that it is another massive opener from Rabbit Junk. Again, JP Anderson manages to reactivate the feeling that something hugely important and worth fighting for is going on in our little boring everyday lives of consumers. He carries on with the same idea on “Radical Acceptance” which is a heavy anthem with its necessary repetitive hook. That track too suffers from being one of the rare recent Rabbit Junk songs. Although JP Anderson certainly exactly hit the mark -the melody is well introduced into the song and repeated numerous times without actually becoming boring, the whole thing being just as epic as it needs to be – the track feels a bit shallow and would have beneficiated from being one out of a ten tracks album for example.
“Broken Highways” marks Sum Grrrl’s only appearance on the EP. She sweetly enlights the verses with her poppy vocals until she’s replaced by JP Anderson for the bridge and a great new-wavy chorus which gives the track a nice nostalgic feel. It certainly is the best thing the EP has to offer although it isn’t saying much as there is nothing average in here, each song is at least quite good.
It seems obvious that Rabbit Junk does thing at its pace and although it is atrociously frustrating, the precision with which each song is crafted and their strong character makes them entirely worth the wait. The band rarely misses the mark and surely it would be a disappointment if they did because they rushed things.
The conclusion to this review is simple, Rabbit Junk, give us more songs but uh… just… uh…
