The Modests/ “Don’t Hold Back” / No Label

Very fun rock, upbeat and sunny, but balanced nicely with gritty tenor vocals. Sometimes slip into standard safe chord progressions, but still a good time. Well produced, layered songs, sounds like a band that’s been recording for a while despite it apparently not at all being true (they’re still in school according to the paper insert!) A couple of tracks feature singing in a foreign language, perhaps Gaelic/Scots seeing as how they’re from Scotland? You can definitely hear the singer’s accent pretty frequently.

No FCCs detected, though I can’t speak for the foreign language featured on tracks 4 and 5. Favorites include: 1, 5.

1. *2:05 Favorite! Sunny rock, makes you tap your foot to the beat, layered guitars, singer sounds like he’s having a good, wild time (“ooo ooo”s thrown in occasionally).
2. 2:14 Acousitic guitar, xylophone, builds to more uptemo ¾ of the way through. Vocals have a vague The Strokes feel, heavy Scottish accent pretty apparent here.
3. 3:40 Great uptempo, use of cowbell, nice powerchords on electric guitar.
4. 4:18 Slowly builds in beginning to faster tempo, electric guitars and xylophone. Begins in foreign language… I think. Before I knew it, they were speaking heavily accented English again! Oh you wild and crazy guys!
5. *3:17 Super uptempo like mid 90s punk, breaks down a bit to regular uptempo. Nice vocal harmonies. But then gets uptempo again! Then downtempo! You guuuys! Again with the language change-up too. Very fun.
Deniz Cebenoyan