The Swarm: pretty good bandname. ‘Red paint on the Odessa steps’: beautiful album title. Thus the expectation: quite high. The downfall: great. Think chaos; think terror; think psychos; think Romper Stomper; think punkrock chicks with hundreds of piercings in all the wrong places; think dirt; think 15 days unwashed hair; think of people puking; think of them making out with a smudgy stranger right after; think broken beer bottles; think of smashing guitars and breaking equipment; think of audience members getting into random fights; think The Young Ones; thinks of the smell of stale water: doesn’t it make you sick? If it does, don’t ever listen to this album.

Alas, it does make me sick, thinking about stuff like that. The Swarm they said, was grunge. Grunge I like: Alice In Chains, Jerry Cantrell, Soundgarden and to a lesser extent Nirvana, I have been a fan of for years. The Swarm however, embarks on some kind of grunge-punk filth trip, and the result is dreadful.
As for the Romper Stomper reference, I don’t mean this British band are nazi’s or anything like that, just the atmosphere of drunken filth, is kind of the same.
Callum Thompson, the singer, deems it necessary to scream like an idiot throughout the CD. Punk kind of idiot. The two guitarists completely cock it up as well, in keeping with their half-wit sounding leading man.

The drummer, well, he’s also all over the place, but then again, that seems to be the band’s main objective: structure is hard to find in the instrumental chaos that is ‘Red Paint On The Odessa Steps’. It’s like Bleach-era Nirvana at their drunkest and most uninspired, with a little Sex Pistols drug-induced punk.
In the eight songs on this record, there is not one that has any kind of redeeming quality. The lyrics are pretty all right, the song titles are really good -‘The last friend left alive’, ‘The night the rope broke’, ‘My stomach senses a break’-, but every time the songs result in the same (somewhat) musical massacre. Every time it’s dumb, sloppy riffs, sludgy, basic drums and extremely annoying vocal antics, ranging from whining to silly ranting, to screaming, to whining and then some more whining.

Maybe, just maybe it can be some sort of fun to see The Swarm perform live and break everything, when in the right mood, but my god, why did anyone ever give them a record deal? With what purpose? This is one of the most talentless bands I’ve heard this year and by far the most annoying record I’ve listened to in a very, very long time. It may be a debut album, but who in their right mind willingly can stomachs this utter nonsense?