The Great Last - Rio

Hear The Track Here

Another request from the Rebel Riffs blog, The Great Last are a London based Indie alternative band, and London has more than its share of them so the competition is fierce. All of which is a good thing for people like you or I because such competition only raises the game for everybody. For my money, its one of the prime pleasures of living in a big city like London. Gigs in my area are ten a penny, but so are the bands, and it's rare to find a night that has less than three or four bands on the bill, all of them playing their hearts out. Got to say tough, that most of those bands I have seen in my travels rarely travel properly onto some kind of recorded media. They might work like crazy but it's impossible to capture it technically.

Right off it's obvious that this band don't have that problem.

The problem that they have with this track is of a very different nature. It is ******* scary how much this track sounds like Joy Division in their Ian Curtis heyday. It could quite happily sit around with She's Lost Control, Transmission et al and no one would blink an eyelid, so uncanny is the resemblance. Whether this is intentional or not is something I will find out when I see them live, but judging from the other tracks on their Myspazz page, it's certainly something they are not sparing with. On all the tracks I heard, it is obvious that the band is tight, coherent and punky with it. Just the recipe for a night out, know what I mean?

Having listened to the other tracks it is apparent that Rio is the most muscular and finished technically. Damn thing bounds out of the speaker at you, eager to prove that it can tempt you into that weird little dance Ian Curtis was famed for. What comes across is that this is a band who know their stuff, have a clutch of very decent songs and a spooky reincarnation as a vocalist. How can it fail? Certainly as far as someone like me, who just needs that daily fix of new fresh meat, The Great Last have just been added to the menu. Besides, I like a little bit of attitude with a song, and it sure sounds like they have that.

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