Stand Up Guy, Avenue Unawares
Posted on 25th Aug 08 by Paul Groome | 
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You can feel the grit and grime of many an underground gig…..
We learned this week the sad news that Stand Up Guy have called it a day, so, we’ve republished an article that appeared some time ago on the site about their excellent Avenue Unawares release. Fair thee well boys…..
This is the first release from Stand Up Guy I’ve had the pleasure of hearing. And so I don’t have the benefit of a previous release as a point of comparison. This is not a bad thing. I think Avenue Unawares is well able to stand up on its own too feet. It’s clear that these lads from Belfast have definitely put in the effort.
Stand Up Guy, Avenue Unawares
This is ” honest to God” metal. None of your namby-pamby-ask- me-bollix bullshit. The morose atmosphere isn’t something that would normally appeal to me but it did. You can feel the grit and grime of many an underground gig emanating through in the music with definite flavours of Katatonia in this and also a touch of ISIS aswell.
Over the course of a few days of listening I developed a few favourites. Our Keloid Ways The Manner Of Cutting In and Enclaves Observatory are some of the best tunes on the album. The downside is they left me with a sense of anxiety. This is partly because for the duration of the album I kept waiting to be completely blown away. Each song remains quite consistent in tempo from beginning to end which is not a bad thing.
But when there’s such an atmosphere and tension being built up as Stand Up Guy have done you can’t help but expect that any moment now a time change or a breakdown is going to kick in and rip your face off. But by the time the final chords rang out I felt as though I didn’t get it. Perhaps I didn’t. But I liked them enough to be keeping my eye out for their next release.
Overall I think these lads are really heading somewhere with this recording although I’m going to have to check them out in a live setting to find out their ultimate destination.
Drop-d rating: 7.5/10
Tags: Avenue Unawares, Enclaves Observatory, ISIS, Katatonia, Our Keloid Ways The Manner Of Cutting In, Stand Up Guy