The Daily Spin, November 23
Catfish and the Bottlemen | The Ride
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Happy Thanksgiving! I am grateful for all of you who read this. 327 of these things down. Pretty good, huh?
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: The Ride (2016)
Artist: Catfish and the Bottlemen
Link:
Welsh rock stars Catfish and the Bottlemen first found a formula that really worked for them with 2014’s The Balcony - and they’ve basically just stuck with that for everything else they’ve done. Thank goodness for that, because it is fantastic.
There’s something about the lightly slurred lyrics in most of these songs, a drunken protagonist angry at all the mistakes he’s made in the past, emotive to the very end even when he’s not quite sure what he’s feeling. There’s a rambling sort of feeling to his lyrics, slippery and rough or not, and though I don’t always think it hits, I also think it lends a very real sort of authenticity to the sentiments of rage that lurk in the instrumentation and the choppy, pounding riffs that power so much of this album.
It’s nice to find rock music that maintains an upbeat pace and a sort of heavier edge without dropping into metal standards - and sure, this record is wildly noisy in the quiet spots, the sort of music that rarely takes a moment to ease back off, but when that’s what you want, I don’t think there are many better candidates.
Rating: 8.8/10
Best Tracks: Anything; Twice; 7; Soundcheck
Worst Tracks: Oxygen