St. John’s band Swimming invites us into a world where the floor is sticky with beer and your roommate’s crumbs, the truth really is out there, and math-rock-inspired guitar riffs dot songs like stars in the night sky.
The thing about emo releases like Swimming’s EP More of the Same is that they make me want to pick up the guitar again and scream into a microphone even though I have never done the latter. Actually, at this moment, listening to the stony sounds of the St. John’s band’s release makes me want to buy Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 for the Nintendo Switch but I digress. [Sometime after writing that sentence but before this review was posted, I found out that Swimming has a song called “Tony Hawk” that mentions playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater!! It must be a sign.]
Swimming’s Liam Ryan, Jacob Cherwick, and Nick Hunt play their instruments and sing with an urgency and honesty that’s inspiring, fun (despite the despair of lines like “I’m broke as fuck again,” from “Gower Tower”), and catchy as hell. For about six minutes, Swimming invites us into a world where the floor is sticky with beer and your roommate’s crumbs, the truth really is out there, and math-rock-inspired guitar riffs dot the songs like stars in the night sky. On “Words For Moving On,” the EP’s final track (whose tempo noticeably drags to match its downer lyrics), Swimming transport you to the summer after you graduated high school, and right before all of your friends move away; to a time when you wish for more of the same days and as a consolation prize you scream the kicker of the song: “my life passing by gets hard.”
