Style is everything. Bowie constantly reinvented himself, Creeper burned their stage costumes after their album tour, and The Black Parade is as much about the uniforms as the music. When creating theatrical music you can embody it, you can live it and you can make it an experience. The Howling know this. They’re a new band launching themselves with an EP appropriately titled ‘Salvo’, a word that means a powerful, opening shot.
Three things define the music on ‘Salvo’; alt rock, a flair for the dramatic and a love for the gothic, so you can’t help but compare it to My Chemical Romance. Notably, the opening song ‘Little Promises’ switches between verse and chorus in a way that shares the same vibe as My Chemical Romance’s biggest hits. Meanwhile, the opening moments of ‘The Murder Capital‘ could almost be an extract from ‘Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge’. This isn’t simple copying though. There’s more to the sound. It’s ambitious and very much trying to be its own thing.
After setting the tone on two fairly distinctive rock songs, they deploy ‘Unholy’ as the central showpiece. With a big opening riff, a nod to 80’s hard-rock histrionics and a theatrical outro, it’s the band saying this is what we can do. It’s the highlight, make no mistake. That’s in part because, while the energetic ‘Incantation’ and the punchy ‘Little Promises’ are also strong songs too, the EP overall plays it safe. Given the type of music, the type of band and the EP’s title, you’d expect The Howling to try and blow your socks off, but it’s not like that. It’s cautious. There’s no short, snappy single or anything truly gonzo to catch your attention.
Luckily, however, the vocals are quite distinctive with a delicious and slightly creepy tone, especially when they’re leaning into a more emotional register. This is notable on ‘Incantation’, which is the definition of an earworm as you can feel the phrase ‘join me’ slowly burying into your brain and lodging itself there. Despite working well, it might not hook you the first time and this is true of the EP as a whole. The reason for this is the band’s other big influence, The Smashing Pumpkins, as well as the way they lean toward an alt-rock sense of richness and scope rather than punky accessibility. This extends to the production choices, meaning the sound is thick and layered with quite sharp edges. It’s an interesting and unusual choice that makes the EP feel like a distinct piece of work. However, it does cause problems on ‘The Murder Capital’, where the song winds down after less than two minutes and its aggressive outro solo gets lost somewhere in the watery layering. Similarly, the closing ballad ‘New Religion’ builds from a simple vocal into a style that’s fitting but not exactly gripping, meaning the EP’s closing act holds together like a damp tissue.
The Howling have style but ‘Salvo’ proves they have substance. It’s a solid if uneven debut from a promising new band.
IAN KENWORTHY
