Jump up and down music

A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of some very hectic personal circumstances, I somehow managed to find time to review Pyro, the debut album by alt rock/punk pop band Rews. I knew it was going to be good because both 'Miss you in the dark' (which features in November's F-Word playlist incidentally) and 'Shine' were fantastic singles, fast and furious, with solid guitars and a professional sheen that didn't get in the way of their musicianship.

What I didn't bank on was just how good it was going to be.

You know when you put an album on and you're expecting it to be OK, and it turns out to be way, way better than you expect? It was like that.

I found myself drawn, incessantly, to rock cliché when writing the review, meaning that I quickly dashed off 800 words, thought it was quite good, then looked at it two days later and went 'No, no, no...' Amended it a bit, sent it off for it's editing, and got it back from Ania at the F-Word with an email along the lines of "Come on now, you can do better than this..." and some suggestions as to how this could be achieved. Which I was very thankful for because, reading it back again, I could see I'd written the sort of thing I used to write for Record Collector and that what was needed was a much more inventive approach.

It is hard to write about very guitar orientated music sometimes when you don't play guitar. I always fret a bit that I'm using words like 'chord', 'riff' and 'hooks' in the wrong context. Not being a musician, I tend to write reviews based on how the music makes me respond emotionally or physically or, failing that, I rely on description of how the actual sound comes across to me. I remember when I wrote fanzines in the riot grrrl period I had a particular series of words I would use to describe the guitar sound on riot grrrl and post riot grrrl records. I think 'skittery' was one, or I'd actually try to write the sound of the riff (?) phonetically sometimes if 'skittery' didn't do it justice. My friend Helen Wray, who wrote Dancing Chicks fanzine in the late nineties before moving to London, becoming a journalist and a London Rollergirl, once memorably described Sleater-Kinney's Hot Rock album as being "Less raaah!" than their previous albums, and I knew exactly what she meant.

Because I was reviewing Rews for The F-Word, not Record Collector, the vernacular and description required did turn out to be much closer to the sort of thing I would write for Aggamengmong Moggie in the mid nineties than for Record Collector in the 2000's, and I think I had a lot more fun with the second draft of the review as a result of that.