Burden’s Landing By Winchester Revival Review

Burden’s Landing by Winchester Revival has many good noises, and they are combined quite well. The Winchester in their name isn’t entirely wasted as there’s a bit of Western style guitar work playing through the robust soundscapes. If I had to make a comparison off the cuff I might point to bands like Dredg. The songs feel less personal than Dredg’s emotional outpourings, but there’s plenty of dramatic vocals swooping over distorted melodicisms.

Since showgaze broke onto the scene there’ve been scads of bands happy to layer shimmering distortion on slightly less shimmering distortion and pass it off as “langorous”. As fashion left them behind they faded with their times because they failed to grasp the attention to detail that the best of the best imbued their discographies with. Which isn’t to call Winchester Revival shoegaze precisely, but it’s one of the elements at the core of their sound, and they deserve some recognition for imbuing with some detail work.

It’s not all swooping, warbling distortion though. There’s plenty of cascading guitar work, spinning electronic noises and angelic vocals to go around. Despite the range of influences, “From the intensity of post punk to the mindfulness of LA 70’s pop to the etherealness of the shoegazers,” if you believe the press release, everything comes together without feeling overstuffed.

Songs are impeccably paced and lean towards the pop end of the spectrum. Most songs are in the 4-5 minute range and eschew too much sprawling or jamming. You won’t be carried away by minute after minute of crashing waves of noise, but neither are you left particularly pining for it. All of the members carry unspecified musical histories from other bands, and it shows. Almost everything is tightened down and trimmed. These guys sound like they are getting done what they want to get done without ever feeling like they’ve run out of ideas.

You can stream their lead single, Last Night In Tokyo, here: