Big Wave Riders :: "Waiting In The Wings"

The lyric at the end of the chorus, so European, so post-punk, so cloudy that you can barely discern its outline, is the instruction: "Take me to the future now". It is a moan, a sigh, a veritable get-me-over heave toward to whatever comes next. For Big Wave Riders, a band gearing to release their debut LP, the lead single, "Waiting In The Wings", draws the aperture broad enough to let us see just what this future might hold. Aesthetically, the exterior faithfully updates early Cure singles, something like "Killing An Arab" that would have viewed a song like "Friday I'm In Love" as a sort anathema. Big Wave Riders do this sort of plagiarism with reverence and a bit of sonic thickening, filling in the gaps of the Robert Smith narrative with big, echoing claps and chasing guitars. The next thing, as usual, is just something old, made new in the enthusiastic hands of the present.

Big Wave Riders :: "Behind These Walls"

In these cheap, one paragraph reviews we all write - the scary footnote being that we historically write more than our peers - it is always tempting to delve into easy metaphors. A band called Big Wave Riders? Let's immediately trot out phrases like "wall of sound", maybe we let you make the connection, or maybe it's more obvious and we talk about being "washed away"or even more cheaply, we use the word, "crest". It's graphic in both senses of the word, but imagery of this type is as lazy as it is pervasive. Finland's Big Wave Riders are thusly not a band that remind me of anything, despite some of the obvious shared genetic material with countrymen, French Films. "Behind These Walls" features an impatient, even urgent bass line, as the backbone of crashing vocals and a soaring, unintelligible chorus. It is instantly full of hooks, a tidy pop song, shoegazing in parts, loads tougher than the Drums and more fun than anything else you'll do this morning. Unless, you've gone surfing. This is harder than it looks.

Listen :: Big Wave Riders - "Behind These Walls"