### One Arm Short: Utopian cellar

#### 29/04/10 || Khlysty

Having randomly chosen this band for review, from the heap of new records that the Lord puts up for us staffers to pick – SOON!!!-, has proven to be a chore much bigger than I ever thought it would be. See, no matter how much I scourged the Retardnet, I couldn’t find nothing more than the band’s MySpace, Facebook or Twitter accounts. No record label, with the proviso that the band might be unsigned. No song titles. Just a small bit of band history. Some pix. And, well, that’s about it. So, dear friends, now you’re gonna have to bear with me and live with what meager info I have been able to gather here and there about this band. Sorry, in advance.

Okay, here’re the facts: One Arm Short comes form Sweden. They’re a quintet and, in their own words, they play a mix of hardcore, punk and metal. Oh, and they have some serious Hot Topic-informed sponsors (I shan’t tell you who they are, check out the band’s MySpace and find for yerselves…). “Utopian Cellar” is their first official recording, contains seven songs, ranging in length from some seconds to almost 5 minutes, and, at least to these ears, don’t sound much different from the dungheap of a jillion other bands that play the whatever-the-fuck-else-is-called-today-emo-core that the kids seem to love so much.

Having never been of friendly disposition towards said genre, I really have no clue if One Arm Short is any better than their contemporaries. I suspect not, although, having a deep-seated repulsion towards said “genre”, I never EVER paid much attention to its purveyors, so as to know if and what differences exits between one band and the next. From what I hear, though, our Swedish friends here seem to mix pop-punk (in the line of Blink 182 or whatever the fuck they’re called…) with a totally streamlined “emo” sound and vocals that alternate between an excessively annoying throaty scream-growl and poppy clean choruses and whatnot. The guitars try –unsuccessfully- to sound like they have bite, and the general idea seems to be “play loud and the kids would think we’re HEAVY”. Of course, things don’t work that way.

Look, I feel that I’m eating up valuable space here, so I’ll make a long story short: if I was 14 y.o., had never listened to any kind of serious pop music and wanted to impress my “emo” friends at school, I might give One Arm Short a break. As it is, though, I find the music here annoying, derivative and having the lasting value of a fruity-taste bubblegum. And, me, I DON’T chew bubblegum. NEVER!!! That’s all…

P.S.: can anyone, please, inform me what the fuck a “Utopian cellar” is?

- Information
- Released: 2010
- Website: One Arm Short MySpace
- Band
- Oscar Holz: vocals
- Zeb Mattsson: guitar
- Rob Hansen: guitar
- George Boras: bass
- Aaron Wittman: drums

- Tracklist
- Despite my valiant efforts, it was impossible for me to find the titles to the songs of this record.