Space-pop from Floridian duo Greymarket is kind of what Radiohead might sound like if they’d taken their music in an Electric Light Orchestra direction around the time of The Bends. Opening track Lightyear Song is a pop-opera driven by L. Cave McCoy’s guitar, programming and vocal, with Michael Gargiulo on drums, it’s a fine showcase for the two men’s individual skills but a tad hollow as a song all of itself.
Waterworks is a little more successful, a falsetto uptempo ballad that’s reminscent of heavily diluted Muse. It power-pops towards its conclusion with McCoy’s strong voice barking ‘Everytime we try a little!’ as his guitars soar like Brian May straddling a rainbow. There’s definitely a certain candy coating to the band’s style which occasionally means their tracks are all surface shine and very little underneath, but with track’s like the intergalatic car chase music of Hey Mr. Spaceman it’s pretty evident they seem more content crafting potential sing-a-long choruses than anything that might endure with McCoy slowly morphing into Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters.
Make Sense is a far more successful collision of styles with McCoy crooning like a lounge singer over twinkling guitars and Garguilo’s drums bringing woozy anthemic swaying, building towards a chanted mantra of; ‘I’m trying to make some sense to someone, I wish I could to you.’ It’s followed by dreary Aha-like I’d Wait Years with bubbling synths and layers of McCoy’s providing lilting backing vocals before tired big-chord choruses.
There are some great guitar twiddles on Love Machine that sound like a glittery version of the theme from The Munsters, and he gets to show off with some solos here and there and whilst the track is interestingly arranged it fails to make a connection with the listener beyond a certain distanced admiration for ability. There’s a change of pace on Fall Of Stars with sweetly swoonsome strings over finger-picked guitar and McCoy’s voice soothing and dog-eared like Badly Drawn Boy. Slowly the track builds momentum, the guitar being strummed with eager anticipation before McCoy cracks into a Freddie Mercury-like bark, but the ensuing chorus repeating ‘But it’s not so far’ isn’t quite delivered with enough hair-raising passion and the instrumentation wrapped around it, whilst awash with sound, isn’t as spine-tingling as hoped.
For the most part this record is happy to chug along without the tone shifting too much, each successive track making the same bid for anthemic status, it all becomes wearying and repetitive. Whilst there are moments here and there (the pizzicato fade out on Never Better, the nice extended pause on Wings) overall things just blur into one another. So, whilst technically accomplished Greymarket begin scraping the barrel a little too quickly on this LP, and though their particular brand of high-pop was a change from the norm to start with it loses its sparkle and leaves you with an altogether somewhat forgetable record.
[Rating:2]
