Around a year ago The Silent Ballet’s Leanne Simpson wrote a rather favorable review of the debut effort of Swiss band Overdrive Amp Explosion. Leanne concluded her review stating “Overdrive Amp Explosion has shown that they are not restricted to one sound, and they are willing to experiment with the mood of a track.” By all means this is a good thing, a great thing when you consider that it was their debut album and it can take bands years to even realize the potential of such an approach to their music.

So after their debut release, it was expected that the band would mature and come more into their own. However, with their sophomore release, Blanks, the band has not lived up to any of the expectations one might have set for them. Blanks features nine tracks and is almost forty minutes long - which doesn’t seem all that bad by normal standards. However these nine tracks are rather hard to get through. The high point of their last album was their ability to not restrict their aproach and to play with emotion, and this has been completely sucked away from their sound. The byproducts of this sucking are nine tracks which all follow exactly the same cookie-cutter approach and each of which has nothing special to offer. In Blanks, the band establishes a basic melody, builds on this melody (rather crudely), has a little interlude in the rhythm, returns to the same melody from before and then repeats this course of action till the track eventually (and thankfully) comes to an end. Each track follows this same method, and the album quickly gets annoying with its repetition, but that is not the only thing. In their first release, the band utilized lyrics sparingly and made them fit with the album quite well, but in Blanks there are lyrics in seven out of the nine songs. Lyrics on their own are not a bad thing; however, they serve no purpose in this album, are rather difficult to hear, and have no emotional or catchy-ness value; they just leave the each track feeling kind of raw.

With their sophomore release, Overdrive Amp Explosion have seemingly underdriven themselves to the point of implosion, and the end result is nothing to be proud of. While it is never good to cut down young musicians, sometimes it’s just better if they just go back to their original plans and try to build upon that foundation. All that’s left to do is take this record out of the listening rotation and hope that Overdrive Amp Explosion’s next release is not as much of a blank...

-Erich Meister