Napoleonic Wars: Loop Train Line | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- I’ve never really bought into the deep, philosophical seriousness with which some fans regard Neon Genesis Evangelion. Is Shinji an emotionally-crippled messiah? Are the super-villainous dads, ethically compromised scientist mums and brutalising tween girl mecha pilots a Freudian / Lacanian analysis of human existence? Is the increasingly avant-garde strangeness and use of repeated frames a profound new chapter in the means of storytelling or did the producers just run out of money and lose their minds? I don’t know! Maybe once I tried to work it out and wish I hadn’t! However, Gold Coast based, math-tinged-post-hardcore kids Napoleonic Wars have made their whole new album, Loop Train Line, a riff on that iconic slice of giant-robot-fiction. Whether they bring further insight to these matters is a question that’s as open as the rest of them, but their angular, frenetic guitar-rock -sweetly singing one second and screaming the next- is as evocative of Neon Genesis’ jolting trauma as any other music I can think of.

It’s been three-or-more years since the band’s standalone single Triple-D-Dank, which was the first of their material I heard. An epic compressed into four minutes, the rhythms chop and change at high speed, the harmonised riffage is excellent and it sounds like At The Drive In, even as it wears a goofy Van Halen grin. You know, I’m not actually sure NW do have a sense of humour - it’s like, if you’re going to base an entire album on an anime series you either have to be a joker, or very, very serious about what you do and while there’s evidence both ways - like finishing advance album single Wookie Blunderland with the lyrical flourish “ska-doosh!”- on consideration, I think it may be the latter here.

Whether the band can or cannot laugh at themselves the are developments going on that are easy to see: for instance, they’ve just about doubled in size. The most notable effect of this is Tiana Florea whose Goldie-accented vocals are clean in a way that makes her sound like she’s in a whole other band. At any rate, it allows NW to exercise the post-hardcore dirty / clean vocal contrast to maximum effect. Frontwoman Sarah Schwenk, can now leave most of the regular singing to Tiana, focusing on a banshee scream that threatens to tear the joint apart.

Other additions, like Matt Sorenson’s keys and the sporadic but highly evocative sound of Toan Le-Vo’s tenor sax make Napoleonic Wars’ contemporary sound thick and rich. When it all comes together, like on the song Barriers, every other ingredient cooking in the guitar fuzz, it’s quite a buzz. Less effective is the production which is the work of the band’s drummer, Jake Morton. It has a low-fidelity warmth which might suit a band like Harmony, but is not so good at bringing out the multi-layered spaciousness of NW’s surprisingly delicate instrumentation and intricate rhythms.

Much like Neon Genesis itself, after several trips round Loop Train Line, I’m not really any clearer on why Shinji is such a dick. In the manic emotional swings, the showoff rhythmic change-ups and the firestorm of screaming and guitar noise, it’s probably irrelevant. Down in the middle of that hell Tiana croons “Will this angel heart satisfy you?” like Asuka Soryu holding aloft some giant, twitching monster impaled on a gargantuan spear and, you know what? I’ll take it, even if I am holding it for the director’s feature-length recut, due for release a decade from now.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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