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Album Review: The Smoking Rolo Sideshow — Rocket Silence

21st Mar 2010

STARTING with song names wor­thy of a dis­re­spect­ful emo band, I wasn’t hold­ing out much hope for The Smok­ing Rolo Sideshow.

But what we’re inter­ested in here at the lowly depths of Red­brick Music is not band pol­i­tics, or how pompous they come across. We are inter­ested in music. So, to the music: it’s bril­liant. If Pink Floyd, Queens of the Stone Age had an acousti­cally influ­enced bas­tard child then that child would be The Smok­ing Rolo Sideshow. There are a cou­ple of miss tracks on the album, but mostly they’re on target.

Inter­est­ingly, every song has a very dif­fer­ent feel (pos­si­bly due to the band being made up of about thirty mem­bers, just a few of whom write and record songs at a time) but it coa­lesces well into an album.

Rang­ing from hard rock to almost Belle & Sebastian-esque sooth­ing­ness, Rocket Silence is a very inter­est­ing album and more than lis­ten­able. Even if their band dynamic is a lit­tle strange, they seem to bash their col­lec­tive heads together well and some­thing good does fall out.