Twenty seconds into the disc and a paranoid bass line drips all over a grating overdrive guitar and my expectations are cranked up several gears. And then the Nu Metal swamps me. To quote Mr Partridge, I thought Nu Metal was moribund, but apparently there are a few still rolling like steamrollers, their fans mashed to the turning grinder…
…This review is going to be crippled from the word go because I’ve never liked Nu Metal…I was a little too old and set in my ways by the time the ring wraith legions of guys in black hoodies began pouring out of the cracks; but even though most of the tracks here could be a wrestler signature tune, it isn’t too bad.
It’s got a lot of the trademarks…the spidery, reverb soaked guitars and watery ‘Nevermind’ bass lines, the soft / loud song dynamic and vague lyrics, straining to be profound…but there is a juggernaut tint to a lot of it, especially when the speakers are right up and shaking apart at the joints. Tracks like ‘Revolution’, ‘I Wear My Skin’ and ‘We Bounce’ are the rigour de norm, sounding like a big power chord car boot sale: pick and choose your bridge and middle eights, you righteous dudes. Kkerang! TV fodder like Korn or POD…sometimes, on the rare occasions that I’m at home, I go to a hard-rock club in Newcastle and I see people get hurt in the pit to stuff like this. Once, I witnessed a guy, naked from the waste down, get slammed into the floor and a galaxy of broken bottles, and for what? Bog standard Nu metal with no soul and trade marked ‘rage’. I don’t know. It’s not my scene, so I’m bound to be missing out on some magic element, but about half of the tunes on ‘One Lie Fits All’ caused my to slip into an almost dreamlike state of flirtation with the STOP button.
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But there’s a definite strain of something purer here. The song structures on the likes of ‘Representing The Poor Man’ and ‘Price Of The Kings Ticket’ are pretty ace: long stretches of eerie, deep-space noise, build ups to nothing, fades, sudden bursts of blood. They have a genuine smell to them, not simply the token ‘sensitive’ numbers a lot of bands feel the need to offer up for sacrifice every now and then. ‘The Hill Is A Hole’ is beautiful in its understated sadness and melody…always threatening to take the easy way out and explode, but never doing it.
At nigh on eight minutes long, ‘Representing The Poor Man’ is the end of disc epic. Singer Yap seems to have channelled the tantric spirit of Sting to guest vocal on this one…it’s uncanny…but anyway, it isn’t the best tune on OLFA, but it shows One Minute Silence to have ambition that’s a cut above the rest, and skill enough to make it work.
And now the closing metaphor...the way I make it out, OLFA is like a chunk of granite shot through with a vein or two of gold (hey, I’m no geologist): Too much heavy, featureless rock to mention but a couple of really bright, forward thinking flashes to make it worth while.
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