Driving South

'Moist' - Demo Review - January 2006

by Chris Thorp

Quite what Driving South are trying to achieve with their music is difficult to grasp. If you’re interested in bopping along to some good old-fashioned rock - this band are not for you. If you’re expecting intimate, soulful tunes – you had better look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you have an enthusiasm for mid-paced, inoffensive music with a verse, a chorus and seemingly no imagination – you might like this. The opening, self-titled track starts promisingly enough – a solid bassline leads into a wah-guitar riff which manages to capture some amount of interest, but settles all too quickly into the bland, strumming style that paves the way for the rest of the CD. Pub-rock style vocals deliver a repetitive tune for almost the entire length of the track. It doesn’t help that the chorus is hardly identifiable from the verse. The only apparent difference being a repeated lyric that seems to drill itself inside your head until you’re forced to skip to the next track. ‘Scarcely Aware’ displays a more up-beat side to the band, although the shameless repetition that was present in the first track is painfully re-enacted here. Final track ‘See You Well’ is the quieter of the three, but it still plods along in a similar vein, quickly fading out as though sorry for being played in the first place. All is not as bad as it seems, however, as the vocalist does possess a certain James Dean Bradfield-esque talent. Whilst Driving South’s songs lack in imagination somewhat, it is clear they can play their instruments and with a bit more emphasis on song-writing they may be able to break away from the pub-band image they exude.