I don't know why, but there is something really unsubtle about naming a band Die! Die! Die!. It's like using a nuke to kill a mouse, just a bit too over the top to really ever be needed. It also means that the band has got to do an awful lot to live up to the name, so you can imagine my trepidation as I jammed this self-titled album in my CD player.
And they really don't live up to the name. Not to say that this is a bad album, it's not bad in any way, it's just not that good. To be quite frank, there about a thousand other bands that are playing pretty much the same sort of thing and Die! Die! Die! is just another album in an already overcrowded market of bands plugging away with an angry rocky/punky sound. Just ten minutes after listening to the album I had pretty much forgotten the twenty-one minutes and fifty-three seconds that I had spent listening to the album, which just goes to show how generic and samey this album is.
The album is also poorly mastered, with gaps between songs when it seems that the band aimed for the album to glide between songs without time for the listener to pause. It just comes across as if the band had nothing to do with the final product and it just detracts from the album as a whole. When "Disappear Here" bizarrely ends mid drumbeat I spent a couple of seconds wondering what happened to the end of the song. I'm still not sure to be honest if this was intentional or not.
One thing that really comes across as you listen to the album is a sense of urgency and a threat that Die! Die! Die! are going to explode at any point into a rage filled powerful breakdown. While they never take it to that step, the sense of danger that the album gives off is quite a nice thing to find on an album these days as we find ourselves having Pro Tools ironing out any kinks and removing the rough edges on most modern recordings.
Die! Die! Die! is an album that shows potential, and I think once the band find their own sound and start to move away from just being another band with the same sound they will push on to somewhere much further and better. However, this is the album from the back catalogue that only gets bought by the mega-fans.
