From its first woozy guitar hit, Going Back With My Friends undercuts all the bubbly extroversion you might expect from a group called People Person.
Across five tracks the band – fronted by Boltonian songwriter Adam Grealish – swirl around a central knot of regret at what could have been, only occasionally allowing themselves the catharsis of anger at what is.
Flitting between the litany of genre hallmarks still made to huddle beneath the umbrella of “guitar music,” Grealish and Blake Grimshaw’s guitars never remain pinned down to one sound for long, their various explorations united by ever-present maximalist production. This constant drenching in some combination of reverb, chorus, and fuzz pushes the project into the increasingly popular realm of shoegaze, particularly on “Venus,” but as hazy bedroom-pop vibrato makes way for archetypically frantic indie-rock riffs, crunching alt-rock choruses, quietly earnest acoustic sections, or tense math-rock inflected arpeggios, the sense is more of a band testing the waters than achieving multi-genre fusion.
The EP’s sound is by no means amateurish, however, and the shroud of effects that drapes over the project produces moments of excellence. “Venus”s chorus swells hauntingly over Max Ritchie’s juggernaut bass and a dense thatch of guitars and droning synths, Grealish’s despondent voice weaving in and out of the backing vocals that rise up to enclose the track in an almost suffocating wall of sound. At other points, though, these shoegaze inflections overpower songs, walls of sound instead rising up between the band and the listener as Grealish’s vocals fail to land through layers of reverb and gritted teeth.
It’s when the band builds up the courage to break through this shoegaze overwhelm that the EP is at its best, puncturing the insulating film of production with fleetingly raw shards of vocal fry in “Everything I Do” or the angular guitar that stumbles tensely over Nat Coop’s frenzied drumming in the closing track, “A New Life.” Building the EP to a crescendo, “A New Life”s thrashing close lets loose the emotions that threatened to remain out of reach behind occasionally washed out vocals, finding a satisfying vulnerability in its anger.
Strongest when it moves beyond the impulse to bounce from genre convention to convention, most enjoyable when embracing the vulnerability often deflected by conforming to expectations, People Person’s debut EP is at its best when looking up from its shoes and baring its teeth.
