Jesse, Hi rob from the UK here. Katherine popped through the letterbox this morning, along with a nice shiny photo. Ta very much. Rest assured I'll be putting the CD through the most rigorous testing regime, as we all know sonic excellence is an ideal to be striven for...

Seriously though I'll be giving it a good going over and i'll enjoy trying my best to comment as meaningfully as I can on it. In the meantime I have a couple of 'first impressions' and it'll be interesting to see if they change as I listen more.

- As I said to you before the title really had me wondering. ( But now I understand ) - The first overall impression is of a 'heavier' rockish sound. The mix seems a bit harder all round. Drums in particular seem very prevalent. - I would imagine all these songs work well live. - If this was the only thing i'd heard by you I think I'd be missing some of the breadth of 'Getting off...'. Of course this is only a 4 track EP, so I know that its not easy to get the full picture across, just thought you might like to know how it comes across;

Fork in the Road Nice contrasts between heavy and quiet sections. Good lyrics as per. A blast. Like the megaphonium vocals and effects in the middle 8. Nice to hear the Chris's go mental and soon after that to hear the mellotron sounds get cranked up and mental too. I bet that has some great moshing going on towards the end at live shows. In fact after the final tremelo guitar twang at the end, I wanted to hear the track strike up again for some more. A fine track. Sounds like he's singing 'Fuck in the road' this may be good or bad.

Jellyfish Good to hear the beatles tones back again ( I realise you may not be trying to sound like 'em, but those harmonies...) . Although I think the drumming is excellent I find it a bit too high in the mix and actually a bit too well recorded/compressed/gated/touched up later. It makes the whole track sound a little hard when the rest of it is a bit 'jaunty' in feel. (By comparison, I prefer the sound and feel of the drums on something like 'Return' on getting off the rev, which I think is a classic peice of drumming). I think various bits of added backing vox could be sprinkled into the mix without getting too cheesy. The repeated lines at the end sound great in a round and thats what happens right at the end. I think the round maybe could have started earlier.

Ringworm Like the super heavy riff at the start. Like the lighter start to verse and the bridge. The heaviness and hardness seem to be where it is required on this one. In fact this is becoming the favourite. Its a stomrer. Must be fun live.

Lucid I find the rather heavy duh-duh duh-duh stuff a bit strong on this track. I can see this track could work well given a really retro treatment, more like having stuff like the sound effects at the beginning of the verses going on through the whole track, like some of the early Pink Floyd singles (e.g Arnold Layne), to make it really quirky. It a good quirky song turned into a rocker, after three other rockers. I love the nutty tango-esque section near the end.

At first take the whole EP has a very similar sound and 'feel' across all of it and doesn't show the variety of moods you have at your disposal. Maybe this is what you intend. I also suspect that there's more in there that will reveal itself as I listen more. (e.g. i've only just spotted the tango quirkiness section in Lucid). So don't think I won't change my mind on this.

Ok thats more than I intended to say at this point, so I'll stop. Thanks again for sending it and i'll be listening to it a whole lot more. I definitely like it, but I know you want to hear more than just an unreserved thumbs up and an 'awesome' rating, so any little criticism I can make that isn't just pointless nit-picking I'll send your way. Anyway once I have the tracks memorised and dissected I may not hold these views any more, but as I say this is all first impressions. As it stands this is of course head and shoulders above most of the rest thats out there. Well done.