To be honest, i'm not really a fan of EP's. These short albums mostly feature about 15 minutes of music (sometimes even less) and although it's fun hearing some new songs of a band you like, i think it's a shame the songs on the EP are usually also printed on the next album of the band.

This EP was recommended to me, by a guy who is a huge Puller fan, so i got curious of this, especially since i'm not that big an EP fan. Both Puller and Roadside Monument contributed 2 songs to this EP. Puller is the 'opening band'. The first song, called 'Nothing To Prove', is a great song. The song only features clean guitars and the nice voice of Mike Lewis, so in a way it's an acoustic song!

The second song is called 'Lobbyest' and has this great, unique Puller style. Or so i thought when i first heard this song. It turned out to be a song written by Roadside Monument! Mike Lewis (voice/guitar) has a great, distinctive voice which goes great with this song. Especially since he knows how to hit some sort of a 'melancholy-feeling' in this song. Great bridge, too! This song sounds like a typical Puller song, just because it's not as chaotic as Roadside Monument normally sounds. 

The 3rd song on this EP is Roadside Monument's 'On Molasses Lake', a typical RM song with great, clean guitars at the beginning of the song and the almost fragile voice of Douglas Lorig. After the clean intro, RM raises it's guitar wall of distortion for a while, then fading into clean yet chaotic guitars again. The screaming which Lorig then rushes into leads to a great, intense, chaotic end of the song. I just love the guitar riffs and clean guitar parts in this song!

The second Roadside Monument song represents what RM stands for on their albums i think; chaotic guitars and screaming followed by slower, more relaxed, clean tunes and Douglas singing instead of screaming. 'Trophies For Optometry' is the name of the song. 

In short: if you love Puller or Roadside Monument, this is a killer EP. If you're into the sort of music these both bands make, you'll also love it. It surprised me that this EP made me want to play my Puller and R.M. cd's over and over again, so in a way, this EP focused my attention on these to bands again! In numbers this EP gets 7.8 out of 10 points.

Martijn

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