Reviews

In creating their debut EP Swordswallower, Tournament borrows from a huge list of groundbreaking acts and sounds. They are parts Fugazi, Braid and Fucked Up. They are sometimes hardcore punk rock with bits of sludgy blues and other times formless noise rock. They are raw musical tension, potentially innovative, creative, but inconsistent. They are the sound of something not quite there yet, but clearly on its way.

The EP opens with the title track, which may do the best job of incorporating the different sounds that appear across the album. It moves loudly and quickly through the hardcore style before hitting a bluesy interlude and then fully returns to the original speed. "Paid in Full" maintains the speed as it employs machine gun style guitar riffs. This song really breaks off in the end as it fades out with wild trumpeting which is, for lack of a better word, really cool. The energy is then dampened by "Traveler," the most mushy and sludgy track on the album, borrowing heavily from the Fugazi sound, only with a little more of the noise genre falling in between the spaces. The EP turns even more when "Night Lion" begins. The track features a bluesy psychobilly stroll as well as Davey Havok scream vocals. "The Bad Word" could come off Machine Gun Etiquette except replace master vocalist Dave Vanian with Goth Davey Havok doing a Blake Schwarzenbach impression and add some metal riffs in the middle. Not a bad list of bands and sounds to spring from.

For just five songs, the EP's a trip. There's a lot here to savor-the moments of blues, those zany horns, the variation between speed and sludge throughout the opener-but no consistent sound to call their own. Not only is this vital for debut products, but for punk music that is sludgy or bluesy or noisy, it's essential that the tracks move into one another, rather than standing alone as isolated samples of the band's various sounds. All the quality moments should be sewn together in a way that the EP itself can stand as the sample and the various sounds are one totally new one. Think of how seamlessly Repeater is put together. Now I'm not saying Tournament needs to pull off something the caliber of Repeater, but the potential is there, and at the very least, that prospect is exciting.