As he looks back to Nineties British guitar pop, the tear drop of misery falling from Max Shire’s eye isn’t rolling with the times.
Goodbye Twenty Nine is this singer/songwriters debut album and flakes from wistful melody to grunge modesty as he plunges through seven tracks that took 20 days to record.
Shire is immediate and easy to place, there’s no skirting around the issues and the personal nature of this record endears you towards the misery despite the generic boundaries it sets itself.
‘Tomorrow My Servant’ burns with a passion that’s hard to ignore as Shire sets himself free with wailing vocals, harmonies and driving guitars. There’s no place for the modern mainstream as he creeps into the earlier realms of the Brit Pop era for over seven minutes.
The schizophrenic air to ‘Office Scum’ is not without imagination but the roughly welded shifts in direction show Shire to be in idea overdrive which inevitably leads to system meltdown after bouts of popped up jerk indie clunks into power pop rock with the singer/songwriter declaring: “The scum will rise, will claim our minds.”
Despite the patchy and overloaded nature of Goodbye Twenty Nine, there is a potential that lies in the depths of Max Shire’s sound though it might take a while to unearth through the mountain of schemes presented through the scant seven songs of this debut.
[Rating:2.5]
Release date: Out now
