Review Summary: And there is nothing new under the sun…
North Carolina’s Fake Eyes are yet another addition to the most oversaturated recent subgenre in the musical underground, AKA ‘90s-worshipping bands mixing grungy alt-rock and shoegaze. In this case, we probably should conduct a wellness check on behalf of the band members’ collections of Hum records, as they’ve clearly been put through a cruel and unusual amount of wear and tear. For myself, I tend to like these sorts of acts, but also find this particular style is both easy to do “pretty well” and hard to do “exceptionally”. With that said,
Saccharine Scream is one of the finest examples of this new wave of crunching gaze-rockers I’ve heard, a statement all the more impressive given it’s a debut full-length (following a few EPs). These songs are heavier and more aggressive than most of their contemporaries, without rejecting the importance of melody - listen to opener “Understated” or mid-album standout “Faulty By Design” for proof. The whole record flows wonderfully, induced by a nice blend of longer and shorter tracks, and manages to end with a left-field gentle and mellow closer - the wonderful “An Astronaut Song”. In truth, even that outlier song isn’t really “new”, rather it mines the same oddly “warm and cold at the same time” eerie melancholy of Slowdive’s “Dagger”, but damn, it’s tasty anyway. Moral of the story, Fake Eyes aren’t innovators but what they do they do very well. I suspect this one paragraph will give you more than enough information to glean whether their shtick works for you, but it sure does for me.
