By: Gareth Watkin
Hunck | website | facebook | bandcamp |
If you happened to go see The Polyphonic Spree perform their debut album ‘The Beginning Stages…’ in its entirety last year in London, and you’re the kind of person who gets early to things just to get to the front, then you most likely saw support act Hunck perform. Now, go back further. Did you happen to see Polyphonic Spree in London sometime in June 2014? First support band was The Plastic Dots, the now old-band of lead singer Frederick Tyson-Brown. Very exciting, but what does it mean?
It probably means Tyson-Brown got bored of performing noisy shoegaze and instead evolved his sound to include a more synth-pop element, thus forming the new band Hunck. The band have released their début EP Never Had A Dream, featuring all the wonderful hits that we all know so very well, or at least those of us with half a memory from those few gigs we can actually remember.
Lucky for fans of the group, the songs heard live at these gigs have been recreated pretty much note for note for their first EP, so if you’re one of the people straining to remember what it all sounded like, just boot up EP and send yourself off down memory lane.
Perhaps though, you’d rather not, for Hunck certainly know how to shape everything nicely, from their instrumentals to their vocals in order to create an accessible shoegaze sound, but damn if there is anything actually interesting going on here. There’s a lack of that great spark that makes us want to connect to the music.
Hunck definitely have tried to do something for their debut EP, but they have failed to actually produce anything of true interest. It’s not unpleasant; it just passes by without impinging noticeably on your attention. Most likely fans of The Polyphonic Spree will see Hunck again if they make their rounds back to London. Could be worse I guess.
