The most impressive achievement of this record is its ability to take the unexpected and make it sound entirely natural. The result is an album that’s intricate enough for the die-hards to get lost in, but immediate enough to bend some ears on Xfm’s clogged airwaves.
Their debut's diversity is its greatest strength - it's enough to highlight the best qualities of a multi-faceted band, but is never disjointed.
Outfit are instead more intent on being direct, wielding hard-hitting songwriting through the most oddball means available. As a result, we're left with one of the year's stand-out debuts.
Performance captures the best elements of Outfit's dark New Wave influences and molds them into a fantastically consistent album.
They’re not as poppy and immediately catchy as, say, Metronomy (who they match in the ‘vibes’ stakes), but there’s a rather enjoyable sense of sullen confusion in the matter-of-fact vocals and doleful, summer-gone-wrong expanses of keyboard.
This is a debut packed with resourceful ideas, textural intrigue and compelling rhythms, which ultimately falls short only from a sense of unfulfilled potential and a lack of consistent execution.
Outfit are clearly a decent band with good ideas who deserve a future, but they’ll need a much stronger record than this if they’re to stick around. Most importantly, they need to inject more of themselves into their music.
OUT OF MY COMFORT-ZONE - CHALLENGE
DAY 13
[Genre(s): Electropop, Synthpop]
The debut-album by Outfit shows potential, with it's diversity, it's consistency, and it's overall good production. The record has some really standout moments and elements, that you would not get with their contemporaries and their competitors who also thrive in this type of music. Bands like Metronemy are more catchy, but Outfit really delivers an one-time experience that the other can't really deliver. The record is ... read more
#17 | / | Under the Radar |
#32 | / | The Line of Best Fit |
#36 | / | Time Out London |