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The Agreement - The Loneliness Award

posted by: Tim de tweede on 20 August 2006

Stand Up

The recipe for good punkrock is, in my view, fairly simple. Basic ingredients are vocal harmonies and tight guitar riffs. For extra flavoring, one could use a little sauce of melancholy.

The Agreement is able to deliver on all of these requirements. The brothers Hans and Raf Weyn (ex-members of Skools Out) are able to dish up some tasty vocal combinations.
The musicianship of the band is really skilful and mature, as one would expect from musicians with this many years of experience in their former bands Skools Out, Unsure and Sincere. Also the melancholy is well taken care of, even if it’s rather subtly blended into the music.

But the key-ingredient, that which makes punkrock punkrock, is lacking on large parts of this record. I am talking about speed. Punkrock should be fast! The Agreement is more of a mid-tempo band, and exactly that is my main point of critique on ‘The Leaving Award’.

It’s not that this is a case of a reviewer being a purist prick, but it’s just that the faster, grittier songs on this album (‘I am Human’ and ‘Burning Car’) are the better ones in my view. The other ones are fairly average poppy rock songs with a little bit of a punk-vibe. The hitsingle ‘Leave the Light on’ – these are not my words, it’s what the sticker on the cover tells me – is an example of the latter.

This kind of songs could qualify The Agreement as a safe opening-act for Di-rect, while they show in other songs that they have the capacity to be musically way more interesting than that.

Rating:

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Related bandprofile: The Agreement