LATE NIGHT FICTION - POLAR
Grey Man Records

When it comes to made-up genres, Melodic Post-Hardcore has always struck me as being particularly straw-clutching. Not as a criticism of the actual music – but seriously, do we need to keep compartmentalising music down and down further into niches?

Late Night Fiction have that P-H label attached to them, but less nit-picking listeners might see this as straight-forward shouty Emo, and while I’m sure that term – a ridiculous bastradisation itself – is now soiled to the point that no ambitious act would want to be labelled thus, in truth I don’t think it really matters except to the idiots in the music press.

Anyway, this 5 track effort is a decent effort and bound to appeal to fans of the genre, however we describe it. Opener Black Watch is an ambitious, multi-levellled slice of stop-start, crunching, bellowing rock. It’s not necessarily typical of the album though – the rest of the tracks offer a mix of the quiet and the furious, with jagged, spiky guitar riffs. The possible high spot is the instrumental Smashy “Smashy Beast' Beast (yeah, oh-so-witty titles remain de rigueur it seems) which is allowed to build with a sense of actual melody without taking a step left-field. Elsewhere, it feels a little as though the band are trying a bit too hard to both fit into and deviate from genre expectations at times, which doesn’t always work. There’s no doubting that there are a lot of ideas at work here, but sometimes, less is more. Then again, I’m not a fifteen year old kid finding this stuff for the first time. If I was, I’d probably be massively impressed, and that’s probably what really matters.

In any case, there is enough interesting going on here to suggest that the band are worth keeping an eye on once they finish developing their own sound.

DAVID FLINT

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