House of Protection have been making waves with their first EP Galore being released to critical acclaim, so how does the difficult second EP measure up?
We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to impressively noisy two-piece bands showing that all you need is drums, guitar and some pedals to make as much noise as bands with three times the members. We’ve had the sadly missed Ghosts of Men, the chart-storming Royal Blood, the amazingly incoherent Lightning Bolt, and darlings of the ArcTanGent Bicurious to name but a small handful. Now it’s time for House of Protection to carve out their own slice of this specific niche.
Following on from debut EP Galore, Stephen Harrison and Aric Improta’s new venture House of Protection are out to put their own unique stamp on the music scene but after a strong start their follow-up EP doesn’t quite stick the landing. To be blunt, Outrun You All lacks the teeth of Galore, and anyone coming in expecting more of the same upbeat, fast-tempo metal in the vein of ‘Pulling Teeth’ or ‘Learn to Forget’ are going to find that this offering leans far more towards the ‘Better Off’ end of things.
They’ve front-loaded the heavier tracks here, with ‘Afterlife’ and ‘Fire’ both featuring catchy rhythms and memorable hooks. They’re the two standout tracks on this EP and getting small children to chant your lyrics is a sure-fire winner regardless of your musical genre. After that it’s a slide into increasingly airplay friendly nu-metal stylings that just don’t really make much of a lasting impression, even after listening to this EP more than half a dozen times. It commits one of the cardinal sins in any artistic endeavour by managing to be just plain forgettable.
Outrun You All feels, in a word, safe. Radio-friendly music videos featuring rubber-clad, whip-wielding dominatrices aside. It’s more Linkin Park than Rage Against the Machine. Seriously, ‘Phasing Out’ feels like someone raided Mike Shinoda’s scrapbook for songs that didn’t make it onto an album, and closing track ‘Slide Away’ is dangerously close to pop punk territory. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with either of those genres it just doesn’t really feel like a House of Protection song either. For a band that screams lyrics like “Rule number one – Fuck what they think”, this EP feels like they actually put quite a lot of time into worrying about what other people think.