Front End Loader – How Can We Fail When We're So Sincere?

March 11, 2002 • Redline Records

An Aussie friend of me recommended Front End Loader as one of those kind of bands who are well-liked in their own country but never made it out for one reason or another. It's a shame because, based on this album alone, this band is really damn good at what they do. Normally, this kind of catchy throwback-rock isn't much of my thing, but Front End Loader manages to put together more than a few great songs in a way that still seems pretty fresh (and it came out ten years ago).

Perhaps it comes with the experience of being a band that's been around for a while but never became successful enough to get knocked into a niche like Cog (my other favorite Australian rock band)—the amount of blues and punk influences attest to that. Heck, even their "ballad"-type track "Original" is probably one of the best on the album. Like I said in my last review, it takes talent to put together an album with a lot of different styles that works as a whole: Front End Loader has done it pretty well. Where else can you hear a punk song that has a bridge that sounds like David Bowie wrote and sang it, but it still fits?

It helps that the songs are all incredibly catchy, to the point where I'd call at least four or five of them legitimate earworms. I guess there's something about their sound that appeals to me on some fundamental level—maybe that they sound like a lot of the '90s alt-rock bands I heard when I was a kid that my dad's cover band would play, combined with some of the punkier stuff I like nowadays and the slight exoticness of their Australian sound. But even that aside, they do write some excellent lines that are simply fun to listen to, and really, isn't that all that matters when it comes to this kind of music? I think so, anyway.

There isn't much to say about the technical side of things, except that I really like the prominence of the bass guitar and the gritty distortion it brings out on a few tracks. The guitars also pull off an impressive array of effects and manage not to overdo it—everything fits in well with the mood they're going for.

I won't say this is entering my all-time favorite albums, but Front End Loader is definitely going to get moderate rotation in my library for the foreseeable future. Plain and simple rock, and sometimes that's just all you need.

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