Room Full of Strangers is a punk rock group consisting of Erik Bundy (Bass, Keyboards, Backing Vocals), Mick Mcluan (vocals), Austin Wulff (Drums, Backing Vocals), and Nik Sedilla (Guitar, Backing Vocals). The band release their new album, Bad Vacation, on Godless America Records/True Trash – prior to embarking on a European tour...

I have a love/hate relationship with punk rock: I love to hate it! Let me elaborate. I had little or no time for the original and raw height of punk, but I could appreciate the post punk era of the late seventies, when the bands still had something to say and railed at the world, but they knew how to play their instruments. In other words, they were structured bands who knew how to be melodic but still get their point across. The Damned, The Stranglers, and a handful of others. The Ramones brought a fun but harder edge to punk, and Green Day have made pop punk with traces of metal accessible to mainstream audiences.

Bad Vacation sees a transformed Room Full of Strangers, having come through some hard times and bad experiences, now portraying through their music a more positive attitude to life. It’s ultimately a story of persistence and resilience; striving to overcome the negative events, because they know it’s ultimately worthwhile. But where does all this pretentiousness get us with their music? I hear you ask.

It’s like a local band has had some threads purposefully pulled out of the stitching to make it more than a little frayed around the edges. Rather than naturally unpractised as a unit, it sounds as if it has been amateurised to gain the required feel. Even so, it’s somewhat too refined for what is supposed to be a punk record. The retro cover artwork, depicting a woman dancing with the devil, seems to actively ground the album in punk’s origin era. It wouldn’t be out of place on the front of a Dennis Wheatley book, but it isn’t a good indication of what to expect.

4

Ty Power