Call Upon The Author

A complete patchwork of an album, no single song is the same. They seem to draw on influences from Siouxie & the Banshees, The Cure, The Cult and even, to an extent, System of a Down. Yet while they take something from each of these bands, they are nothing like them. Love On An Oil Rig is so completely unique that it’s hard to compare it to anything.
Upon hearing the title track it’s easy to mistake this release as a ridiculous, outlandish and perhaps an ambitious statement, yet the almost tone deaf battle of supremacy between drums and guitar is just the start of a very experimental and a very promising journey.
After forty-seven seconds of pure obscurity, Love On An Oil Rig swiftly establishes itself as an eclectic, unpredictable collection of music. Whether you want to or not you’ll find yourself tapping your feet in time with the irrepressibly catchy backing vocals and continuous beat of bass and drum of ‘Bored In Belgium’.
However where some of the songs are absolutely amazing and are perfect examples of the band’s sheer creativity, some of the other songs fail to compare to the high standard set at the beginning of the album. ‘Worker’ while not musically inept is rather tame and unsatisfying and since the main body of the song is in fact the word ‘worker’ quite repetitive.
Thankfully it’s not long before V.E.G regains their momentum, clawing their way back up to the standard of the previous songs and surpassing it. Although not as overtly insane as other tracks of the album ‘I Say What I See’ is just as memorable and just as capable of claiming a place in the never ending cycle of your thought process as the insistent beat persistently batters against your ear drums.
V.E.G waft between genres, always moving from style to style and genre to genre. It seems a shame that they haven’t settled on a style that isn’t purely themselves yet. But maybe, just maybe that’s where they belong, floating ethereally between the boundaries of music, gingerly pushing until they blur all distinction.