Essex rockers British Standard could hardly have picked a less appropriate name. While I wouldn’t dare question their actual nationalities the sound here is American through and through and thank God the music is anything but standard.
So its hardly a surprise to find that the band are something of an enigma. They bizarrely describing their own sound as ‘bringing back the 50-60s’ though I’m struggling to hear it. Certainly there is a retro quality to their sound but more a mid nineties to early naughties that instantly brought to mind a slightly angrier Matchbox Twenty and though I’m sure they’ll cringe to hear it there’s clearly a lot of grunge to it too. Matt Wye’s vocal is without doubt the band’s real talent sounding both raw and raucous with bucket loads of character. The rest of the band are competent but rather unspectacular by comparison, which is a real shame because there’s a lot of room for things to really explode and yet things often seem a bit stuck in first gear. Some of the blame for this has to fall on the production which is a bit non-existent: the mixes are quite neutral and just don’t sound as edgy or in your face as the songwriting calls for.
For reasons I’ll go into a bit later I was restricted to reviewing songs on their myspace which is seemingly a mix of old and new material so my judgements are somewhat an overview of the bands sound as a whole. The standout track up is ‘Traffic Lights’ which reveals a lot more depth and is the first track to really show a chartable quality. Wye’s vocal here is immaculate and the performances on the whole sound as good as anything you’d hear from Major Label backed bands. The production again lets the track down slightly but lesser so than other tracks. The guitar tones especially are much improved from the slightly cheap and muddy tones heard elsewhere on their page.
In such a competitive climate for rock bands its so important for bands to stand out from the crowd and that usually means as much professionalism as possible. Unfortunately thats where things started to go wrong for British Standard. They were laudable in getting me a CD in the post very quickly but thats where the professionalism ended. I ripped the envelope open with some excitement (I always love free CDs, and just the thought they might be the next big thing) and turned the CD over in my hands inspecting it closely. The CD inlay was a home printed job of fair quality but featured a sort of press release style blurb written in a painfully awkward third person perspective with some questionable grammar. Then I laid eyes on the CD itself and my heart sunk. A completely unlabeled Tesco(!) CDR. I had a sense in my gut that things were not going to go well and my suspicions were confirmed when the CD would not work in either my Laptop or my CD player. In fact at time of writing I’m still trying to find something that’ll play it. Its a shame mostly because I know from myspace how good the band are and I genuinely was excited to hear a whole congruent album from the band. But what I was sent reeks a bit of budget and cut corners. Short Run duplication is not ridiculously expensive and really should be the minimum standard for a band of British Standard’s quality.
There’s a lot of potential here a lot of which is yet to be realised but I think it wouldn’t take much to get this band up to the lofty heights of stardom. In my opinion all the band really needs is a producer who can really push their sound to match the quality of the songwriting. That and to look a little further than Tesco when thinking about duplication.
