Darwin And The Dinosaur are a band that love writing music and you can see the love in their debut album A Thousand Ships.
The album opens with the song Theories which starts with a great demonstration of the bands song writing ability, a heroic sounding riff complimented by impressive drum beat and a groovy bass line. The vocalist is a bit drab-sounding next to the impressive instrumental but the actual song writing ability of the band is clear to see here.
A Thousand Ships has 4 filler songs which are under all about a minute long, and they’re songs that demonstrate the bands ability to compose and arrange lovely sounding acoustic pieces that sound somewhat nautical which fits with the whole theme of the album.
Making Friends with Strangers opens with an impressive drum beat which leads into a heavy riff which would make you head bang easily, the vocals in this song suit the instrumental better as the harsher vocals compliment the heavier guitars. The song’s not pieced as well together as some of the other songs on the album and sounds a little bit like they had 3 song ideas and combined them all to make one song.
The album has some great verses but overall the songs don’t necessarily flow as well as they could; maybe that’s an artistic choice or maybe the band just had some trouble getting them to work, either way it doesn’t really work and they could have potentially spent more time polishing a few tracks on the album such as Hand In Hand and Riff Town Population – You.
Overall the album has some shining moments with some incredible drum work, phenomenal guitar riffs, groovy bass lines and some catchy vocal lines and it is clear the band are very passionate about writing, but they need to just spend a little more time polishing their work, because if they do that than they could produce some absolutely spectacular work. But, until then they’re only another band with potential.
6/10
