Item: Creepoid - Cemetery Highrise Slum
Rating: 4

Reviewer: Huw Baines

Released: 22nd June 2015

Label: Collect

With Creepoid, there is a sense that all roads have led to ‘Cemetery Highrise Slum’. Leaving aside the fact that the record represents a shift in circumstances for the Philadelphia quartet - it’s their first as a full-time band and their Collect debut after time on No Idea - it is a fine encapsulation of their alluring, unsettling blend of melody and misanthropy.

As its title suggests, Creepoid aren’t all that enamoured with the world around them. Bolstered by the cleanest hooks of their career, though, the observations here are easy to swallow and therefore all the more troublingly effective. Written and recorded in a matter of weeks, it’s a document by a band who understand the competing elements of their sound and are able to play them off one another with subtlety and no little skill.

“So sick, so worthless. What you see is what you get,” croons Sean Miller on ‘Worthless and Pure’, a mid album highlight that dismisses thoughts of changing the future because we won’t be able to make it stick. The song breezes along, with dissonant guitar helping the lyric sheet to scratch beneath the surface.

Each radio-friendly jab is accompanied by sentiments that’ll sit you down and force a rethink, a factor that’s aided further by a spick and span production job from Peter Mavrogeorgis, who keeps the fuzz intact while singling out individual elements, notably cutting through the haze with off-kilter high end guitars. The result is a mix that’s less oppressive than earlier albums, but perhaps more sympathetic to the deceptively complex, layered approach employed by the band.

Creepoid shouldn’t be taken at face value. Each move they make can be studied and unpicked, each word checked for hidden meaning. ‘Cemetery Highrise Slum’ is a maze; disorienting and satisfying in equal measure.

Tags: Album Reviews, Reviews, Collect, Creepoid