Bellshill. There’s a place that I want to go for my holidays. Come on, you’ve thought about too. Well, perhaps you might have thought about it that time you were on the smack. Still, Bellshill has a Cultural Centre (cue the sound of more of my council tax money getting flushed down the drain…) and it did provide the artistic inspiration for the best song involving a train station ever (that’s “Bellshill Station” by The Just Joans, by the way). Bellshill is also home to a rock band called Void Pleasantries.
Their “From Afar” EP would appear to be their second and it is something of a melancholy affair with all four songs being heavily weighted towards the downbeat. You would think that any self respecting rock band got themselves going so that they live the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll life but not, it would appear, Void Pleasantries. They seem more comfortable with a good book and an early night as more credence is clearly being given to meaningful lyrics and slow building emotion than to fire breathing, crowd pleasing instrumental virtuosity. “Collapse”, for example, does start big but drops back to that mid paced melancholy before a final run at goal and John McKellar’s vocals, whilst nice enough throughout, aren’t really what is required of a lead singer in a rock band where much more passion and theatricality are the order of the day.
So, all in all, Void Pleasantries have made a nice enough EP here but they just lack that incandescent power that a rock band should have.
The "From Afar" EP is a free download.