Sunfactor: Original Motion Picture

When Londoners Sunfactor were making a name for themselves a couple of years ago, supporting the likes of At The Drive-In and Rival Schools, making a fleeting visit to one of Deep Elm’s big-selling ‘Emo Diaries’ compilations and broadly generating an buzz throughout the underground akin to a swarm of killer hornets, no-one imagined that a few years on they would be relative unknowns. Now 2003 sees them releasing a debut album that ostensibly clings onto the coat-tails of the massively popular, major label artists Hundred Reasons and Hell Is For Heroes. Except this isn’t plagiarising. This is Sunfactor, through and through.

As you can imagine then, this is 12 tracks steeped in the kind of UK ‘emo-core’ typified by the likes of Hundred Reasons, but which Sunfactor helped to shape and define before their 9 month hiatus on the brink of ‘emo-mania’ just over a year ago. As such, it’s an album sculpted in longing emotional lurches and swathes of emboldened post-hardcore intricacies more muscular than any of the Deep Elm or Jade Tree acts. The Astoria-blasting riffs of opener ‘Invincible’ take Sunfactor further from the Borough of ‘punk’ into a rock-orientated stratosphere where dynamics take precedence over volume and speed, while incidentally sounding like a homogenisation of Hundred Reasons and the Copperpot Journals in the process.

The delicately reflective ‘The Anniversary’ alters the mood through the morose lines "sometimes I get a little distracted / I lose my direction", though preceded by the light-hearted poppiness of ‘Nine To Five’ that gives more than a few nods to NY punkers Bouncing Souls.

While the commercial boat for UK ‘emo’ may have just wound up its anchor this is still a passionate, effusive album that breathes true heartfelt authenticity – something increasingly rare to find in today’s now-commercial emo-punk scene.