More in the endless stream of middling independent-hoping-for-majordom music that I seem to get sent for review at the moment. Seven Days Awake are deftly running the marketing treadmill before they walk the fanbase-building walk, with a nifty/’edgy’ Flash website, street team and the ubiqitous Myspace page with ‘adds’ ahoy. There used to be a time when a band would make its ‘brand’ known by building a fanbase through regular gigging and carefully put together demos, sent in hope to reviewers and promoters. These days, with a few mouseclicks, a band can make themselves look entirely established when they’ve only been together five minutes and have only released one CD single.

Not that I’m levelling accusations of audience-hoodwinking at Seven Days Awake in particular; their familiar-as-old-socks take on a polished hard rock/emo/nu-metal style is at least passably musical, well put together and pushes the right buttons. Smoothly-produced, buzzing riffs tie together the vocal histrionics to result in four songs here that may well be ‘for real’ and from a band that ‘means it’. It’s just hard to tell, as they’ve been presented as such a finished product. It’s nice to make your own mind up about a band, rather than to have it polluted with marketing schtick and a supposed slick professionalism that should develop naturally, not be created prior to an initial release.

Good luck to ’em, but when a band positions and markets itself in the same way that 1,000 similar bands are doing at the same time, it’s hard to distinguish the individuality or creativity; traits that unfortunately seem to come at the back of the queue in the current musical landscape.

Seven Days Awake

Posted: 08|28|06 at 10:09 pm. Filed under: record reviews.
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