The first comparison you want to draw when listening to Aquatramp’s eponymous EP is with Metallica and the second, for instrumental similarities, is with Black Sabbath. While these comparisons would be favourable they don’t tell the whole story of this EP but it is a good starting off point.

The opening track Better Days leans towards an accessible sound and while its Metallia-esque qualities lie in that band’s more commercial period it is the only song on the EP that does so. Regardless of that element of the track’s sound it is instantly appealing with a musical bass-line that recurs throughout the five songs and that gives many of them a jazzy or a bluesy quality. By the end of the opening track we are into hard rock.

The Reaper’s Garden reveals the mechanics of a Black Sabbath tune with its creeping bass-line but develops from that point to becoming something different, angrier. This form of developing musical themes is a staple of the EP without ever becoming predictable. When the song goes upbeat about fifty seconds in it is unexpected but it works and keeps from the kind of ennui that you get when listening to a song that you know is going to change and you wish it would just do it already.

The best song on the EP is The Getaway a bluesy hard-rock number with a bass-riff that gives the song its opening theme from which it builds. This riff is instantly memorable and perfect for the kind of simple driving guitar that comes in eventually, elevating the song off the sleezy bar-room floor into a thumping mosh-pit.

While it wears its influences on its sleeve the ‘Aquatramp EP’ features five quality rock songs varying in tone from soft to heavy without ever going so far in either direction as to make it feel schizophrenic or scattershot at all. Offering a healthy amount of good listening it’s quite obvious that in these songs would become even more lively in a live setting.