Label: Waterfront Records
Review By: Alan Holloway
When writing a press release, it’s important to bung in the
name of a few massive bands in the hope that the reviewer will be lazy enough
to agree with you. It does help, however, if your band could reasonably be compared
with the bands you use, whereas the trio of Black Sabbath, Def Leppard and AC/DC
on Mattersphere’s press release are as out of place as Chris Rock at a KKK
meeting.
Australian newcomers Mattersphere are certainly a band in
the classic rock vein, but unfortunately don’t cut the mustard musically. Creatively,
‘Mattershpere’ is a black hole of uninspired riffs, token guitar solos and as
much musical flair as a broken metronome.
So what’s wrong here? For starters the production is overly
biased towards the vocals, and this doesn’t help when the vocals are not very
good to start with. Vocalist and songwriter (handy to have just one person to
blame) Eddie Deakin can stay in tune okay, and doesn’t shout or grunt, but his
voice lacks any empathy or passion (I’m sure he has it, I just can’t hear it).
The songs themselves could have come from any pub rock band you’ve seen in the
last thirty years, with the only saving grace some good, if functional, guitar solos.
Whilst Mattersphere are fully competent at playing their
instruments, the songs and vocals mean they are unlikely to garner much
positive attention outside of their immediate social circle. The best thing
about the album is the cover, so avoid.
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