Luckily for the listener, Hostage Life puts a reasonably refreshing spin to their collection of Clash inspired punk ditties. Like those bands, Hostage Life contains alumni from Toronto's mid-to-late `90s melodic punk stalwarts, Marilyn's Vitamins. Their label, Underground Operations holds amongst their lackluster releases albums by Bombs Over Providence and Dead Letter Debt., which have been mediocre to downright bad. I'd say I had to agree when listening to the debut full-length by Hostage Life. On “The Light Below” they’ve done just that."Don't judge an album by its label" is the type of saying that seems to get thrown around a lot in the world of punk. The desire to make something truly brave, truly original, and utterly compelling. “She wants a change of scenery” offers Angell, and that seems to drive this. There’s the instrumental “The Other Shoe”, the slow building “My Thoughts Are Not My Own”, and the fragile, piano led “California (One More Phone Call)” which is the most conventional song here, if you like, a pretty conventional ballad, it is nonetheless, brilliant. The last three could be seen as medley, after a fashion. Strutting, not a million miles from Royal Blood, while there’s something of the shadowy, dank Victorian cobbled streets about “Where Did I Go Wrong?” – or a rather less verbose comparison might be Nick Cave….
“Rich Man’s War” changes the vibe totally. And if nine years of following this band has taught me to expect the unexpected, then I still was taken aback by the drum and bass flavours of “Money Isn’t Everything”. His keyboard work is incredible, as is Gregor Lothian’s sax solo.Įven on an album as broad in scope as this one is, then, “Creation, Reproduction And Death” all nine and a half minutes of it, feels like the centrepiece. Dan Spalding had some mighty bass boots to fill, clearly, but his work on the wonderful “Stood Up At The Gates Of Heaven” propels that one along, while the ecclesiastical theme seems to continue with the hymn-like “Going Nowhere” – and indeed, we must praise Benjamin Anderson for his essentially MVP display throughout. The primal wail of “Divine Intervention”, with its low-slung lick clocks in at over eight minutes, but like the rest, it is astonishingly compelling. Make no mistake, though, these are catchy songs, with choruses to die for.
And his lyrics, sound like poetic musings. “The Value Of Zero” is best described as “darkly blues”, and its line of “trust no one, question everything” seems to frame the record as a whole. What “The Light Below” has is actually hard to pin down, beyond that it is a huge, sprawling thing (the 12 songs are well over an hour), ambition, which Walking Papers manage to pull off entirely on their own terms. The real value, surely, is in what they don’t do.Įveryone knows the history, right? Barrett Martin and Duff McKagan were in the band (rule one of journalism is you never assume knowledge, but if you don’t know them, then you aren’t worthy of my explanation), but this version of the band has neither. But they are, very much a rock n roll band. Because, Jeff Angell and his boys are a rock n roll band like no other. All joking aside, it’s the type of nonsense that makes my blood boil.Īnd yet, Walking Papers. It sounds like something that a pretentious arsehole would say (I am only one of those things to be fair) when discussing opera or something: “the real value is in what they don’t play”.
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