It’s quite difficult, I think, to always know the right words to describe music. All too often, I find myself using ‘very’ or ‘awfully’ or something along those lines, in the place of anything quantifiably descriptive. Vocals can quite easily become subject to vague metaphors like “penetrating”; riffs are “exciting”; whole EPs end up falling under that shapeless indie label, reducing months of hard work to a few hackneyed phrases and hazy definitions.
And I’m really not exempting myself from that. It would be quite easy to just say that Colchester four-piece Egyptian Blue leans towards that slightly subversive adolescent strain of contemporary indie music and leave it at that. I’m sure they do. But that doesn’t really define them as anything, does it?
Five-track debut EP Coma Chain expresses the same kind of vocal effortlessness re-popularised by bands like Palma Violets, Swim Deep, Spector, et al. in recent years. After beginning with such a supercilious opening paragraph, I’m weary of saying it sounds ‘languid’ or ‘tired’ or anything like that, but there is this reigning lax attitude throughout that I kinda like. Lo-fi is an idea that I’m only just getting into, but there is that fuzzy sort of fluidity that pieces each individually simple aspect together as part of quite a complex whole over the course of the EP.
And as it goes on, the sound does start to concentrate itself; opening track ‘Venus Fly Trap’ is arguably one of the highlights of this 19 minute introduction to the band, but after a warm-up, the music seems to become conscious of the threat of becoming another diluted copy of something else, and moves away (effectively so) from anything too overdone. Perhaps if it hadn’t, I’d be praising them as a young Joy Division or neat accompaniment to The Mono Polys, but I think that the strongest points of the EP are those where the band markedly steps away from parallels of things already done, ‘Otto Ocean’ being a good example of that.
Overall, ‘Coma Chain’ fits quite well into that youthful scene touring the south at the moment without becoming so far entrenched as to lose any sense of identity. Trying to avoid being too vague, it’s simple without becoming boring, it’s stylised without becoming pretentious and it’s influenced without becoming clichéd.
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Words by James