It’s OK to diversify. It’s all right to have choice. As adult individuals, we can have almost anything we want. When it comes to playing music, The Heavy like to play everything they like in a fashion they can’t help but choose. This debut should be the archetypal album for these eager young turks, and yet The House That Dirt Built sounds more like an oversimplification, a distillation of iPods smelted in a deep cauldron of love. Which is a shame, because this is a band with promise and taste.
The first four songs of the album find the band ripping it up on the ghoulish rockabilly of ‘Oh No! Not You Again!’; then funking it up on ‘How You Like Me Now’; before waltzing it out on ‘Sixteen’ and then shooting up (no, not like that) on the Spaghetti Western styles of ‘Short Change Hero’. Should I continue? Why not. Let’s mention the Led Zeppelin riffing on ‘No Time’ that comes before the floaty retro-rock balladeering of ‘Long Way From Home’ and gives way to the spacious dub reggae of ‘Cause For Alarm’ which, incidentally, is the best darned track presented here.
Of course, the band hold the music together well and vocalist Kelvin Swaby capably serenades invisible devils all the way through but, as can be seen from just that short list of songs there, the band are completely incapable of delivering a coherent album. There’s nothing wrong with citing influences and using them to drive forward a combined, communal vision, but taking a piece of many different pies to make one giant, new pie just doesn’t work because it’s cheating and distasteful.
The Heavy are probably a massive hit live, but on record they just can’t carry it off. Not yet, anyway.
