Umpire 'Now We're Active' – DOA

Excerpt: “Now We’re Active is both a testament to the band’s faith in their own work and a smartly crafted collection of guitar songs which, while it won’t win any awards for groundbreaking artistic imagination or surreally inspired experimentalism, is probably exactly what you might want to listen to when driving from the band’s Australian hometown of Perth to anywhere else on the map… Umpire reveal themselves as a band whose imaginations are very far from limited by their mastery of the soft rock format they introduce themselves with… Now We’re Active is an album which reveals a band whose imaginations are now finally within their own grasp as musicians. Alternately full on, grandiose and brilliantly inventive, Umpire have very nearly made a prog rock masterpiece, and I say nearly only because their more ambitious ideas are continuing to develop. That journey from Perth to Melbourne won’t seem quite so long with this on the car stereo.”

DOA