SPOTIFY REVIEW: Panda Riot “Northern Automatic Music” (Saint Marie Records)

                How do you describe music to someone who has never heard it before?  As a writer, I listen to music and then must describe as best I can to someone who may not even know what other bands or instruments I’m talking about.  If I said, “fuzzy guitars at fast paces with jittery vocals” you could think White Stripes but I could really mean Franz Ferdinand.

                So putting Panda Riot into a category kind of bothers me.   They’re shoegaze, or perhaps more specifically dreamgaze, but while their sound does resemble that of their contemporaries such as Drowner (obvs, since same label), )Videotape( and Savage Sister, they still have their own unique take on it so as not to be confused with any other band.

                I will admit that at one point, I began hearing something like Green Day’s rock opera “American Idiot” in some of the songs, but only ever so slightly and only for a moment or two.

                While I may not be capable of fully explaining this sound to you, I can say that in the world of shoegaze and dream pop (Which is where Panda Riot lives), more often than not the vocals seem to be female.  Yet it never ceases to amaze me how many bands can be shoegaze/dreampop + female vocals and not sound close enough for me to cry clone and move along.

                Also, the pandas need to riot because they are an endangered species.