Yet another band has invented a cute new genre title to attach to themselves. ‘Doom Pop’ is an appropriate description for the music of War Tapes. The problem is that it’s actually more pop than doom, making the grey-hued back cover photograph of the four band members staring sullenly into the camera on a beautiful sunny day kind of laughable. Even so, the production is top notch. Light emoish guitar riffs ride smoothly into the darker lower registers of the punk realm. On that same note, Neil Popkin has a refreshingly deep singing voice that compliments the lighter tracks in an unexpectedly enjoyable way.

The album kicks off with a bang on ‘The Night Unfolds,’ a punishing bass drum driven track that is unquestionably the strongest of the album. This segues into the much lighter ‘Dreaming of You,’ an obvious first single choice. Sadly, the material gets weaker as the album progresses. We get the impression that although Popkin has a knack for imaginative lyrical imagery, the darkness of it all seems unnecessarily forced at times with lines like, ‘All day long I sit and communicate with the dead corpse that I call my girlfriend.’ War Tapes offer a decent album of material that is just barely spared from sounding stale. They’re at their best when they head into the rougher sonic territory – free of pop dilution.

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