The Audible Campaign

Item: Present Day Wars
Author: BW Diederich

Present Day Wars

(2002)

Reviewed by BW Diederich

Discogs YouTube

Label independentDecapolisJanuary 2003

emo indie rock post-hardcore

The Audible Campaign are a new band. The Present Day Wars EP is their debut and they released it independently.

They're emo. Deal with it. They'll probably hate that I'm calling them emo, but seriously, what else am I going to call this. The ep contains five songs, and those five songs are fabulous for what they are. Lots of dueling guitar action and some nice slow to loud quick changes making it easy to clap along and point all over the place while doing that little emo wriggle dance. Each of the tracks, at their core, are way standard, but the rhythm section spices things up a bit on a couple of tracks.

Stand Alone starts with rapid fire guitars and then degenerates for most of the verse into typical emo. The hook though, my goodness, I can appreciate a good hook. I love a good pop song. The kind where the hook just hits you over the head and you can't really avoid humming the melody to yourself. Not that this hook is as overt, but it's coming. You can tell the main songwriter has some good ideas. We can skip right over Don't Forget Your Bags. It's a typical emo barnburner. Starts out all upbeat and slows down near the middle with something which is, I believe, supposed to resemble an ambient passage, then goes back to upbeat. Eh. Not This Time is the highlight of the whole thing. The chorus is HUGE and all sung in this really wonderful staccato vocal style. Systematic we can skip over as well. Even more typical than the second track, it's a lost get up kids b-side perhaps. Don't get me wrong. It's a solid track if you're the type to think a lost get up kids b-side is a good thing.

Finally, we come to This is Collection Season. The final track on the album annoys me only because I'm tired of indie rock and especially emo bands trying to branch out by playing uninspired droney parts. This is the requisite emotional instrumental piece for the first half, then the voice comes in and it turns into a Sunny Day Real Estate tribute. Again, it's a great tribute, just like the get up kids-esque songs, but it's a tribute and a glaring one at that. The intriguing parts of this song are the slight additions of a MOOG in the mix. I'm curious what would happen if they allowed Mr. MOOG to be featured more often.

The Audible Campaign try real, real hard. To be fair the Present Day Wars ep is more than just mildly impressive for a debut in terms of overall quality from a production standpoint, and you can tell the band is tight together. The biggest problem is of the five songs on this ep there are only two really worth talking about. I'm all about supporting bands doing the DIY thing, (They released this themselves! And it looks really nice!) but the music should be worth it.

C-