Cost
of Attrition - There You Go
Ah,
the brashness of youth. Cost of Attrition’s debut There You Go features three
tracks that come brawling out of the speakers with an unabashedly melodic hard
rock sound that has a real swagger surrounding every note. The truly remarkable
thing about this duo is the self-assurance they project. There’s nothing shy
about these songs. Wheeler Castaneda and Joshua Grow make quite a racket for
being the band’s only members and while listeners might be justified in
questioning how effectively they can reproduce these songs live with only two
members, there’s no doubt that the material is geared to succeed in that
setting. These are bracing tracks with a visceral sound and abundant musical
chops, but their youthfulness doesn’t mean they lapse into self-indulgence. Few
debuts you will hear in 2017 have the focus you find with this release. Cost of
Attrition might be selling a hybrid combination of rock, pop/rock, and
electronica, but their Midwestern roots means they go after it all with a
refreshing lack of pretension.
The
lack of pretension is evident from the beginning. The EP opener “Not Your
Psycho” is a distinctly modern tune that makes great use of traditional hard
rock elements. Joshua Grow excels at providing guitar and rhythm section
accompaniment and provides a seamless backing for Castaneda’s singing.
Castaneda is an amazing case – this is a guy who definitely has the pipes to
make a convincing hard rock singer, but he also brings a tangible humanity to
his vocal performances that most working in this area lack. His voice is,
easily, strong enough to compete with the thunderous musical accompaniment, but
don’t get the wrong idea – the musical accompaniment provided by Grow hits
hard, but it’s never artless and, instead, moves in a deep and genuine groove.
“Oh Yeah” has a much stronger groove than the fine opener and the additional
spaces of daylight in the arrangement gives it a much more inexorable feel.
Grow’s guitar playing is a little more restrained here and the song relies
primarily on the interplay between bass and drums, but the guitar comes in at
all of the right times and makes its presence known. The title song takes a
very different route to the same results enjoyed in the first two songs. “There
You Go” dispenses with the powerful electric guitar work in the first two songs
and, instead, laces this song with energetic acoustic guitar. The faster tempo
helps compensate for some inevitable loss of power that comes from ditching the
electric guitar crunch, but Grow plays acoustic with much of the same
combination of abandon and technique.
Cost
of Attrition are the sort of unique act that used to come along more
frequently, but has never been plentiful. The creative energy struck up between
Castaneda and Grow stands out in a crowded field for its obvious honesty –
there’s no short cuts taken with this music, no dishonesty, no gimmickry. The
three songs on There You Go present us the band as they are in this fleeting
moments of time and glows brightly with future promise.
9
out of 10 stars
Bradley
Johnson
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