Shihad
Beautiful Machine

Australians might not know it, but this year Shihad turned 20. Though The General Electric was the album that alerted local mid-’90s 14 year olds to the potential of wiry New Zealanders to rock, they were active in New Zealand for almost a decade prior. Their new album, Beautiful Machine, is their seventh, they are a band well past their mid-life crisis and they now enter, potentially, the moment of their dementia. How are they responding to the challenges of keeping their old fans, making new ones, and staying creatively fresh? By performing something of a desperate T1000-in-a-vat-of-molten-steel flail of genre.

Beautiful Machine begins with the kind of steamrolling beat and pokey guitar normally associated with post-punk imitators on ‘One Will Hear the Other’ but this quickly gives way to a clutch of Jimmy Eat World-style melodic punk tracks. Right on cue, after the mid-album hump, seventh-song ballad ‘Waiting Round for God’ inaugurates a downshift in mood and tempo that immediately gives way to rock in the final third. By this time the shtick has worn thin, and it’s hard to pay even the cursory attention to the album that alerted you to its confused machismo in the first place.

Though relatively high-energy and constituted by efficient song writing, Beautiful Machine bludgeons the listener with a tired sound and Jon Toogood earnestly heaving hacky, faux-deep lyrics, including but not limited to “Hello hello is anyone home/ We’re in this together, all alone” and “We build a wall that’s in our heads/ And it’s not over yet”.

It’s pretty bad.

by Matt Giles