Album Review: Dan Peters - 'Everything Is Calmer Underwater'

Perth’s Dan Peters’ solo album debut ‘Everything Is Calmer Underwater,’ is anything but calm, offering up some brash and at times ferocious punk and grunge tinged rock set to Peters’ wild vocal style. The opening and title track explains it all perfectly, siren like guitars give a frantic tweak to a track that simply explodes in its chorus lines, finding small breaks of space in between a bunch of chaos.

Peters’ guitar tones draw influences from sounds and styles that don’t necessarily fit the type of music he is playing, but this is a good thing, take for example he song Paths that begins sounding like something from A Perfect Circle or Cog until the drums bring in a quicker, driving pace and the vocals and harmonics realign things with Peters grunge rock intent.

The album’s lead single Oh, Valentine! Has a math-rock feel about it in the way the rhythm sections and guitars move during their verses before entering into a lead led chorus line. The album, and songs themselves for that matter, keep an exciting element of diversity about them and the changes between the genre spikes are smooth and cohesive.

Be it from the Radiohead influence of Count The Seconds or the attacking dirty rock attack of Hey Pilot, Peters seem comfortable in what he is doing, almost as if this varied range of styles is simply what come natural to him.

The album’s closing track, Adore, is a beautiful ender, beginning with a bluesy guitar riff the introduction of the laid back vocal line screams Big Heavy Stuff the gentle introduction of xylophone and intertwining vocal lines slowly builds the song slightly before drifting away and then changing into a folk number with swaying acoustic guitars and harmonies.

Dan Peters has offered up a diverse and dynamic debut album full of beauty and aggression that never becomes stale or repetitive. ‘Everything Is Calmer Underwater’ incorporates several facets of the rock genre into one tidy bundle.

1. -

2. Everything Is Calmer Underwater

3. Paths

4. Oh, Valentine!

5. Count The Seconds

6. Lost.Found

7. Hey Piolet

8. Love Me Now I'm Dead

9. Adore