Now that the whole no guitar pure bass and drums band formula is going into some sort of toddler-like stage we can assess the work of bands like this Philadelphia foursome and used other templates as a point of comparison. Of the most distinctive and that we could probably tag as a flagship band we got Big Business (Here Come the Waterworks), whose latest work has taken a right turn and has improved greatly simply by re-targeting the songwriting towards a more immediate sound. Northern Liberties’ newest recording is somewhere in the middle, not so far to the left as to come off as way experimental, nor too right indented as to come off as formulaic, radio-ready, or to grant the tagging of ‘fucking sell-out’, it works quite well for a few tracks, but then it sort of falls and gets rather bland.
It’s obvious that the main instrument is the bass here, its tone is low (though not lower than say a Kyuss guitar) and clear but it carries the weight of the music making the absence of the six strings quite rightful. There are no riffs here, but notes moving up and down and side to side and drums playing their part, quite conservatively I must say, considering this is a band with no guitars. Brothers Marc and Justin Duerr handle the drums and voice/percussion here, and is obvious that in some parts there is an extra layer of skin beating.
The things is Ghost Mind Electricity comes off strong; “Controlled By Voices From Beyond” sounds like a more no wave and cro-magnon Talking Heads, and is followed by “Children of the Unholy Cross’, another strong cut that is singularly great at crafting a different take of the standard rock format. The absence of the guitars is here not an issue; when the track goes hard, fuck who cares about the fucking guitar? But as we approximate the middle of the album the songwriting gets lazy, hooks vanish and ideas of great bands Northern Liberties might evoke are no more. There is great stuff here, but it just isn’t enough and the songwriting isn’t even. “Changing” lacks everything, it sounds incomplete and uninventive. The sad part is the second half screams for a guitar, which kind of breaks the whole objective of the structure of the band.