REVIEW: Turnover – ‘Peripheral Vision’

Artist: Turnover
Album: Peripheral Vision
Label: Run For Cover Records
Genre: Indie Rock

Turnover return with sophomore LP Peripheral Vision, creating a new sound for the band that is one of ambience, purity, and serenity. Produced by band favorite Will Yip, Peripheral Vision is a stark departure from the band’s more straightforward rock sound. Tracks like “Humming” and “Hello Euphoria” bathe in bright sounds, all washed over a hum of air spinning through the background.

With Peripheral Vision Turnover has refined their songwriting techniques to make sure each track consists of little filler, and enrich the purpose of the music as meaningfully as possible. The guitars are much more contained, provided by a new sense of patience and purpose. Guitar lines find themselves overlapping often, but the care and crafting cultivated in these crosses is far above most of what the band has written before. Riffs will sway in and out of the mix, returning to remain stuck in your head until long after the track has ended.

Vocally, the band has never been better. Melodies are just as engraved as guitar lines, and the bridge of “Hello Euphoria” and chorus of “Humming” will have you singing along for days after listening. The band also gets at its poppiest during “Dizzy On The Comedown,” a personal favorite of the album. Try getting those melodies out of your head, I dare you.

The timing of the album is near perfect. With spring blooming, and summer on the horizon, I can’t think of a better album to blast while the windows are rolled down, re-claiming parts of the Earth that were long hibernating during this tired and grueling winter.

With all of the highs Turnover reach with Peripheral Vision, unfortunately there are some lows that keep this album from being where it should be in my mind. The main hindrance seen from the album is not in its quality, but merely its quantity. I feel a lot of listeners will have varying favorite tracks, merely because most of the songs sound exactly the same. “Diazepam” sounds like an earlier demo of “I Would Hate You If I Could,” almost every song starts off with an airy riff that systematically leads into a drum fill into the entire band coming in.

With the exception of “Cutting My Fingers Off,” “New Scream” and “Take My Hand,” most of the songs could be slashed into different parts and strung all together, and you would barely tell the difference. This doesn’t hinder any means of the quality of the songs themselves, as mentioned previously, they just sound way too similar for me to find myself going back to all of them in re-listens besides my favorites that have resonated well with me.

In that aspect, Peripheral Vision becomes slightly disappointing, not because of the wonderful sounds the band has created on the album, nor the production that sits high on Yip’s already deep roster, but the static nature of the songs blend too much to give each cut the attention it deserves. Don’t get me wrong, this album is very good, it just halts itself from being great by repetition that keeps a lot of the songs down, but also highlights the sonic peaks Turnover has reached with the songs that aren’t too familiar.

It’s difficult to dislike Peripheral Vision but easy to love it with the contrast the band created in songwriting. Overall, with tracks like “Cutting My Fingers Off,” “New Scream,” “Hello Euphoria,” “Humming,” the new “I Would Hate You If I Could,” and “Dizzy On The Comedown,” the band overshadows the monotony of the tracks that shadow behind them.

At least Peripheral Vision finds itself as a wonderful sonic evolution from Magnolia, and while I believe it is not the best Turnover can do, it surely keeps me excited for the future.

SCORE: 7.5/10
Review written by Drew Caruso — Follow him on Twitter.

Drew Caruso
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One Response to “REVIEW: Turnover – ‘Peripheral Vision’”

  1. John Bazley says:

    Might be an AOTY contender for me.