Label: Wallflower
Released:
Rating: ★★★★
Brooding intensity is the order of the day for Wallflower’s debut. A band who’ve been tinkering away, honing their craft across a smattering of singles and EP’s, ‘Teach Yourself To Swim’ is a fully realised stare down of intricate human emotions while swinging wildly with the unhinged flow that life can often bring.
With a consistent drive forward, swirling guitars, rolling and rumbling drums, thick bass, all often leave the proceedings, allowing a deft lightness to be left swinging like a solitary lightbulb in a vacant room. Crashing from these squalid darknesses, choruses reign supreme, howling out in hope or in help. ‘Dread’, with its alluding sentiment of “I would die for the chance to feel alive”, proves Wallflowers are fully equipped with missives of such proportions giving ‘Teach Yourself To Swim’ to carry on building a maturation of epic proportions.
The full-on crunch of guitars like thunder clouds are where the heart of Wallflower emanates, but no one moment is wasted on their journey through the fragile human psyche, totalling a debut that is the embodiment of growth and development where Wallflower hold their emo predecessors dear.