It’s taken a little while but Brisbane band The Oyster Murders have finally come up with their debut LP.

Entitled Winter of the Electric Sun, the album doesn’t offer much more than a tool to unfortunately put you to sleep. Starting off rather slow, the album goes most of the way through with not much more than a few dreary effects and some pretty monotonous vocals.

The album lacks anything exciting what so ever in the way of urgency as it makes its way through what seems to be one long song that gradually gets slower and slower until you feel like you have been hypnotised into a sleep state.

The soft strumming of a guitar, the clean vocals and the slow drum beats along with the droning effects just stay the same for the majority of this record until finally towards the end of the album things start to pick up.

Come the sixth track, “Stay Warm by Burning Books”, the sound changes ever so slightly to reveal a bit more musicianship and instrumental depth that make the songs sound a bit fuller and more complete.

This continues throughout the next couple of tracks including “Dissident” which opens with a nice piano intro, “Ghost in Our Wake” and “Signs” which has also picks up speed.

It’s just not enough however to redeem the record as most would have switched off by now anyway. A disappointing debut.

– Chris Condoleon

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