Musical youth!
Here we have a DVD from Engineer Records packed with 20 videos spanning all across the genres, showing that there is no type of music that they favour over others within the rock umbrella.
First track is, 'Ambrosia' by the band We're All Broken, which has a great video of the band dressed up as professors on an Open University parody, whilst the song is a fast–paced hard rock track that will grow on you. This is slightly more than can be said of the Hardcore noise from Nine Days To No One which even has a guy in the video being hung by hooks in his back – not one for the squeamish!
Some of the highs on this include the quite fabulous Cashless from Germany with their Street Punk song, 'Take-Away', which sees flashes of Rancid mixed with classic Good Charlotte. We also have Pop/Punk with gravelly raw vocals that gives it that ballsy and heavier edge in the song, 'The Speakers' by Cornflames. There is more pop/P[nk in the vein of The Ataris, with Andthewinners, and their song, 'All This Was Funny Until She Did The Same To Me'. We have the catchy-as-Hell pop/punk-by-numbers tune of The No-One, but as they are singing in Italian it's very hard to comment on the lyrical content, but I suspect it's just fab all the same! However the rest of their music appears to be in English, so for those of us ignorant English-only speakers, we give a huge sigh of relief!
Let's make no bones about it, this is a long way from being a DVD full of pop/punk! There is a nice Screamo song called, 'Red Eyed Figures Follow Black Cats' by Worlds Between Us, and then the band, Elemae, who have that mid-tempo rock of bands like Foo Fighters and Piebald. I must also take my hat off to Jason Thompson of the band Sometimes Why for singing as well as drumming away, it's always good to see! The band give us some nice melodic rock that is somewhere between Bad Religion and Goldfinger.
Later on we have the fun rock from another Italian band, Red Car Burns, with a singer that sounds a little like Frank Black with a song that is a little alternative punk. There is one of the only slow songs here from Canadian, Nathaniel Sutton, with his acoustic number called, 'Is This What Love's Like'. To finish up we have a blast of hardcore from Losing Six Seconds, and some classic rock with a touch of funk from, Chamberlain, a band from Louisville that deserve to be listened to a little more, before we finish up with some emo-punk from The Fire Still Burns.
For an up and coming label it is always a good idea to showcase the talents on your label, and there is no doubt that there are some talents here. It's also good to see a label taking an interest in rock acts from Europe, as well as the good old US of A. The problem with small labels is getting those small bands to make it big in order to raise the label's profile, and perhaps signing a fallen band may be the best way of doing this as other labels have, although that said there is no reason why a handful of these bands won't raise the profile on their own merits.