EIS Review: Absolute Monarchs - 1

[review by Sam Rosenberg]

Absolute Monarchs sound like they are having a really good time. Listening to “1” you can almost picture the band banging out these excited, corpulent anthems on the side of a football field. “Fell in Line” is seriously the most jumping jack-able song I’ve heard all year. Absolute Monarchs give you the formula right from the door with the first track, “attack”: Churning drums, tempos that call for whatever lies between dancing and head-banging, black eye bass tone, guitars that vacillate between “brutal” and “pretty”, and a little math but not too much for the stomach. Joel Schnieder compliments all of this with faithfully delivered urgent post-punk shout/singing. All in all, the band's take on the genre comes out sounding like if you were driving and the station you were listening to which was playing Kerosene 454 somehow bled into another one playing Motorhead as you passed a barbeque which was blasting that one Franz Ferdinand song. There’s nothing too unexpected here, but there’s very little that doesn’t satisfy.