We Never Asked For This is our short review of a band who thought (or their label/manager/agent/girlfriend thought) that it would be a good idea to send us an email saying “like me! like me! like me!” (more or less).
Today’s blind submission is the latest from Portland dance rockers The Slants.
If there’s one thing we love at the PE, it’s a band that has a healthy sense of humor – and an Asian-American band that calls itself The Slants pass that test with flying colors. Luckily there’s a solid band behind the self-deprecating name that draws from the darkwave sounds of Joy Division and Depeche Mode and mixes it with modern indie rock, not unlike what Interpol have done. Their latest album Pageantry bristles with plenty of pop smarts and often finds itself in The Killers mode. It’s a solid collection of driving dance rock, and we could hear a number of these songs as a radio hit if the planets were to align to shine such fortune on the band. However, the stand-out track for us is the one that breaks from the guitar heavy sound of the album and returns to the oversized-black-sweater-and-eyeliner-with-the-lights-out-dance-party-for-one vibe of their 80’s influences. “Fight For Future” sounds like the best Depeche Mode song you never heard, and it’s only downside is that it moves the rest of the album from an A to a B in comparison. We’ve listened to Pageantry a few times now, but we’ve listened to “Fight For Future” a few hundred. Obviously we would love to see the band move in more of that direction, but when our only complaint about an album is that we love one song more than we love the others, that’s not much of a complaint at all. Pageantry is worth checking out, which you can do via the video for the first single below or right here.
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