What's French for "Maxi's a rocket"?
 

Here's a translation of the review provided by the lovely Dom from Kaddish....


"Although still very young, (a little more than a year old), Archives (not to be confused with the famous trip-hop group also reviewed here) already possess the calibre of a great band. The offspring of a more and more prolific musical movement, the Dundee band demonstrate with this first demo that quality need not take years to achieve, delivering three blows at once and ensuring that we should already take note of their name.

Similar to the savage geography of their country of origin, these three songs are high in colour, relief and grit. With ‘What’s with All the Brutal Honesty?’, Archives open-up straightaway, no questions asked, and play a frank game, in the fashion of Cease Upon the Capitol. Without doubt, the time was right for these Scots to free their visceral voice, as they cut up the rules of composition with feverish tone, spirals of acute notes, and rhythmic oscillations.

An ardent fire smoulders under these first statements from the quintet, and those interested have a sense of the sacrifice, the taste for the grandiose, and the battles which date and mark them. In order to prove it, the group doesn’t hesitate to short–circuit its high tension approach in order to branch out onto an alternative current, launching into the exploration of different potentialities, more proper to post-rock. Delicate meanderings and magisterial breaks follow (‘Breaking Bread with Models and Martyrs’). Suddenly melancholic, Archives then pierce the skin like grapeshot, making barriers fall and pushing the guitars to the edge of the precipice that leads the listener willing towards imbalance.

Disciples of structural breaks and acrobatic juxtapositions, Archives show with this first sketch, a veritable gift for the screamo/ post-rock universe, with slight hints of Dominic, that they already have their own identity. The future announces itself radiantly, like the beautiful cry of a newborn being."