Review Summary: Quality alternative rock
This is the first album from the alternative rock band Coriky. Now Coriky is a very good alternative rock band, which should comes as no surprise - two of the members were part of Fugazi, the veteran rock band that can be carbon dated back to a long time ago... okay not that long but you get my point - for musicians who have been around for so long you can have higher expectations.
Coriky as a band do not disappoint. The musicianship is better than competent, the rhythm section especially. The guitars never do anything particularly interesting, but they complement the music well.
I would like to rate Coriky higher than a 3.0 but this album fails on its promise.
The first couple of songs start off with a formula; a winning formula. Lyrics about the oddities of human behaviour, the verses have gravelly vocals and syncopated drumming, and choruses with tight, boisterous vocal harmonies were great singing crazily infectious lines - they almost get a ‘Posies - Flavour of the month’ kind of vibe on the opening ‘Clean Kill’. When you’ve finished listening to this whole album, you’ll forget the whole second half of it but ‘Clean Kill’ will be playing in your head long after.
Once you get to ‘Cup of tea’ they start letting us down. The lyrics are an amusing comment about procrastination, with - yes it has to be said - excellent drumming. But the song’s a plodder, and feels a bit campy as well... oh well, we’re all allowed a little slip-up.
‘Too many husbands’ sees the female vocalist making a comment about the drudgery of everyday life. This song is heading the album in the right direction. ‘Bqm’ and ‘Last thing’ feature deliciously cynical commentary about modern life ‘lost a password, last saw it on the back of some chair, the chair is sitting in a secret location, need a password just to get you to there’.
However, by the time ‘Jack Says’ and ‘Shedileebop’ come around, the album has lost all its catchiness, the good start is totally forgotten by now. The songs meander and those gravelly male vocals aren’t as interesting anymore. Maybe things can only get better, ‘Inauguration Day’ might be about president Trump for all I can tell, but I can definitely tell you it’s a much catchier song, the band screaming in unison ‘Pageantry!’ to give us an energetic chorus.
Unfortunately, things got better before they got totally worse. ‘Coulda Woulda’ is a five-and-a-half minute epic that is anything but. Okay, it’s kinda funny, but feels campy. The song seems to almost come to a stop, only to keep rolling over with the same guitar pattern and the same chants of ‘coulda coulda woulda woulda shoulda shoulda’, with some mock-country guitar in there.
But once you put your earphones down, and get on with your day, those first three songs will keep playing in your head, and you may even remember that hilarious lyric about selling off dissent to pay for the rent, and you’ll remember ‘Coriky’ fondly.
Often people criticise music because it’s ‘formulaic’, and you may often read the golden line about ‘the formula wears thin’ - however, this album might be more memorable if the band stuck to the formula that made ‘Clean Kill’ and ‘Hard to explain’ more often. It’s still a good listen. Recommended for people that want to listen to a quality alternative rock band.
