  
Is it 1994 again? Apparently its 2011, sorry for
the confusion it’s just the debut full length
studio album from The Feud takes me back in time.
We all remember those days; the days when Nirvana,
Soundgarden and Pearl Jam were the in thing; well
this British 4 piece don’t think that grunge
is dead as they try to rekindle the embers of
a once great era. The question is though what
else does a British band really have to give to
a genre that really has been milked for all it
has? Also do we really need another era of grunge
bands when all the evident originality has been
swept up and put out by some of the greatest musicians
in the world? Let’s find some answers.
They open up the album with song “Dying
to Meat You” is heavily distorted and consists
of vocals that are constantly playing tug and
pull over the line of being classed as modern
rock and grunge, here however a more defiant relation
to Corey Taylor as opposed to that of Kurt Cobain.
Further along in the album we have “Breathe”,
which with every fibre of its being is screaming
Nirvana to the extent where some could actually
accuse the band of plagiarism; it’s not
just Nirvana that the band draws influence from,
that much is blatantly obvious, more sounds they
go for are more along Weezer and Foo Fighters
(“Sick and Tired” sounds extremely
similar to “My Hero”).
I can make whatever comparisons I want –
which I have because it’s almost exact –
but at the end of the day the genre has had its
day, hell “Don’t Care” has a
section of “Hey! Hey!” which is almost
exactly like “Heart Shaped Box” but
am I going to turn it off and go in a mood? No
of course I’m not I’m going to sit
here and listen to more because its bringing back
a genre for me that I’ve been neglecting
as of late, sure I might go off and listen to
Nirvana or Pearl Jam now because I’m in
the mood for it but I think over time I would
revisit this album a few times.
With all that being said then it seems to me that
the question was answered almost instantly; was
this album a breath of fresh originality in a
dominated genre? Of course not, in all honesty
I wasn’t expecting the band to revitalise
a dying genre. One can hardly complain about that
though with the lack of grunge bands to emerge
after the scene died, at least The Feud had a
go at trying to bring it back. With a sea of bands
in modern music pretty much stealing sounds from
one another with every band receiving a comment
that they’ve ripped somebody of nowadays,
at least they weren’t trying to copy some
of the crap you hear these days, I say amen to
that.
2.5/5
Review by James Webb
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