OI BOYS are a French coldwave band from Metz. They specialize in creating desolate atmospheres, ideal to enhance the acid sadness of the de-industrialized panorama of a decaying West. And they do it being absolutely melodic, joining their ability to create small personal hymns with a tendency to nostalgia and drowned hatred. An album that grows with every listen.
Melodic punk from this Lille, France band that really doesn’t do it for me. The band is tight enough, as mostly uninspired three-chord punk goes, but the vocals are distracting, and the lyrics are sincere and simplistic to the point of amateurishness. Imagine a husky-voiced, femme Axl Rose fronting TILT. The vocal delivery is just not a fit. The lyrics rhyme so precisely that I stopped reading them out of secondhand embarrassment. For example: “There was this boy / He wasn’t interested in school / He didn’t care about what was deemed cool / He didn’t mind being taken for a fool / All he wanted was to play music on his stool.” That’s some rough-draft songwriting there. I will say that the tracks were self-recorded, and the production sounds great; nice and thick. But this is something I will not listen to again.
