- Album: 'Throw Your Light'
- Genre: 'Rock'
- Release Date: '3rd October 2011'
Our Rating:
So, what, being a rock-orientated guitar band means you're the Foo Fighters? According to the press release for The Karma Heart's 'Throw Your Light' is to be believed. Drawing such a comparison is, of course laughable, and works on the same logic that if a band uses a mandolin they sound like REM, or using sampled drum sounds means they’re The Chemical Brothers or whoever. But here we have The Karma Heart heralding the arrival of their debut album by telling us about their ‘emotion-fueled (sic), passion driven music’ ‘inspired by the likes of Led Zeppelin, Incubus and Foo Fighters.’
The trouble for me is the vast discrepancy between what the hype and the actuality. What Karma Heart really give us is some mediocre female-fronted rock, more Motley Crue fronted by the bird from Evancessence than anything else. If that sounds pretty bloody awful - and it should, and if it doesn’t please, leave now - then you'll at least know that this is one to avoid. Drawing these elements together, it’s perhaps fair to say they sound rather like *shudder* Paramore (actually, that’s a comparison they also make, describing themselves as ‘a more edgier (ahem) British Paramore’). I mean, it’s hardly anything to shout about is it?
Karma Heart manage to take the worst elements of the aforementioned - in particular the multitracked vocals right up in the mix - and at the same time succeed in producing something that's sickeningly bland in its genericism – and that’s before we get to the lyrics. Kicking off an album with the lines ‘Are we oblivious? / can’t you see that we are all working / Towards some deeper meaning yeah’ doesn’t auger well, and no, it doesn’t get any better. It’s pretentious, pseudo-meaningful bilge of the worst order, and only a sucker could possibly find any merit in it. If you can make it to the end of the eleven tracks, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to, I warrant you’ll still be wincing long after the music’s stopped.
