Celebrity Mansions, the fourth album by the UK’s Dinosaur Pile-Up, has been like finding a needle in a haystack for me. I’m not good at looking for new music and I feel that it gets harder as I find more grey in my beard, especially finding music that is actually good and/or listenable. Maybe my standards are getting too high? Maybe I’m lazy? Probably both. These guys are also pretty well known? Well not to me!
Celebrity Mansions is a fantastic mesh of different styles. There are parts during the 10 song romp that I felt like every band I grew up falling in love with was somehow writing songs together.
As an example the first track, "Thrash Metal Cassette," begins as a straight forward dive bar screamo metal song, and abruptly turns into a pop punk fist pumper only to end with a cheerleader-shouting chorus sendoff. The snare drum on this song also has just the perfect amount of distorted compression to it’ll make you want to rethink how you want your drums to sound in your home studio. The break out song off this album is track 2, "Back Foot," but "Thrash Metal Cassette" has much more to offer.
These guys also seem to have their song writing down as all but one song on Celebrity Mansions is around 3 1/2 minutes long. That’s my kind of song length: not too long to get bored with the 5th chorus, and not short enough so you can sing along with more than one verse. I hear major influences from Foo Fighters, Dillinger Four, Faith No More, early Blink 182 and Hum. My 17 year old self is giving me a jumping high five right now.
Guitarist/vocalist founding member Matt Bigland, seems to be able to nail an assortment of singing styles, which help separate the songs so that you aren’t hearing vocal monotony. My favorite part of this is that when Matt screams, Dave Grohl’s voice somehow seems to come out.
Jim Cratchley’s bass and Mike Sheils drums are solid, however I felt like they could have broke out a little more. I’m not complaining, maybe I’m just hoping that a new band that I randomly discovered can blow me away more than they already have. Now that I’ve had it on repeat for a few days I can add the rest of their albums to my library, as you should.
