16th June 2022
Christopher Nosnibor
This one may have been kicking around for a while, but I’m playing catchup here, as Henry Kelly often used to say on Going for Gold – although I always remember it sounding more like he was telling the contestants ‘yir playing ketchup’. If this seems like an unspeakably strange digression, that’s simply how my brain works, by a lengthy chain of obscure connections, but it does serve to lead – perhaps more by accident than design – to the nostalgia point, in that I remember watching Going for Gold in the early 90s (it ran from 87-96 with Kelly presenting), and while there’s no actual correspondence, I associate the period with my discovery of music in the sense of an awakening: there was a real buzz about the early 90s that is hard to convey to anyone who wasn’t immersed in it, and it went beyond grunge.
With ‘The Truth’, taken from their album Ascension, released on 19th August, Atlanta-based Pistols At Dawn invite comparisons to the driving guitar-driven anguish of Filter and encapsulate that mid-to-late 90s US alternative sound. The guitars are thick and chunky, and there are hooks galore and a huge chorus. The production is dense and its both crisp and dirty, and throw in a backdrop of explosions and backwards baseball caps and everything comes together perfectly. It’s not all about the nostalgia factor, and credit has to go to Pistols at Dawn for a kicking riff-driven tune that’s well-executed – but it’s undeniable that the fact it calls to mind what was, for many people of a certain demographic, an epochal spell in guitar-based music, is a significant part of its appeal.
AA
Aural Aggravation 