Max Shire

Intense personal feelings, nostalgia for childhood, growing older. They’re feelings we all encounter at one point or another in our lives, and in his new album Goodbye Twenty Nine London singer-songwriter Max Shire explores all this and more. Rehearsed for two months and then recorded over twenty days, the album is a labour of time and effort, infused with emotion.
The vocals are natural, full of a kind of inner pride, laced with the touches of sadness. There’s a tension going on here, fought out within these tracks, back and forth. The guitar is melodic, ranging from gentle to forceful at a moment’s notice. The Radiohead influences are obvious, but for those that find Thom Yorke too quirky these days, Max Shire offers a more grounded alternative.
The tracks are long and sprawling, the majority of the songs on the album lasting over six minutes. It gives the whole record a real sense of being an audio environment; a blank canvas that Shire is painting his sounds upon. There’s room for him to explore, to showcase all aspects of his musicianship. These tracks are the grey urban streets, the sounds telling the story of all that which has passed upon them. Office Scum is a definite highlight – as the shortest track here it’s also the easiest way in, distilling everything Max Shire is about into three and a half minutes of greatness.
At times, when Shire really lets loose - such as on Strum – he pulls out epic, Muse-like guitar solos. And it is this capacity for versatility that keeps the listener hooked throughout the album. This is not the sound of a tame indie band who can be pigeon-holed in five minutes and then forgotten about, here the music speaks for itself; constantly changing and evolving from end to start. There’s the string-laced Late that comes across like Biffy Clyro at the more gentle moments. This is beautiful, chilled out rock to calm the soul, to sit back and simply relax to. - Totally Vivid

Another day, and yet another comparison to Muse [I'm starting to see a trend here]. For once though, it seems that this comparison can be made legitimately.

Max Shire is a young singer/songwriter whose previous album/demo, "Love Lost Again", didn't go unnoticed in the music scene. His latest offering, "Goodbye Twenty Nine", is sure to follow suit.

Max's soaring vocals, coupled with melodic, dramatic melodies are varely extraordinary - winning him comparions to, you guessed it, Matt Bellamy - and cult icon, Jeff Buckley.

His ability to weave his vocals around the confines of the tracks, make for a well-rounded and perfectly executed album - demonstrating that it's not enough to say you can do something like someone else, you actually have to follow through and prove it.

While this style of music wouldn't necessarily find its way into my ipod playlists, it's almost assured that it will strike a chord with a generation of alt.rock fans - and undoubtedly, find its way into their hearts.

[7/10] - Push to Fire

As he looks back to Nineties British guitar pop, the tear drop of misery falling from Max Shire’s eye isn’t rolling with the times.
Goodbye Twenty Nine is this singer/songwriters debut album and flakes from wistful melody to grunge modesty as he plunges through seven tracks that took 20 days to record.
Shire is immediate and easy to place, there’s no skirting around the issues and the personal nature of this record endears you towards the misery despite the generic boundaries it sets itself.
‘Tomorrow My Servant’ burns with a passion that’s hard to ignore as Shire sets himself free with wailing vocals, harmonies and driving guitars. There’s no place for the modern mainstream as he creeps into the earlier realms of the Brit Pop era for over seven minutes.
The schizophrenic air to ‘Office Scum’ is not without imagination but the roughly welded shifts in direction show Shire to be in idea overdrive which inevitably leads to system meltdown after bouts of popped up jerk indie clunks into power pop rock with the singer/songwriter declaring: “The scum will rise, will claim our minds.”
Despite the patchy and overloaded nature of Goodbye Twenty Nine, there is a potential that lies in the depths of Max Shire’s sound though it might take a while to unearth through the mountain of schemes presented through the scant seven songs of this debut. - God is in the TV

When the term ‘singer/songwriter’ is used, the stereotype for which it often applies usually conjures up images of a lonely looking gent stood on stage with nothing but his acoustic guitar. They will normally play the same 4 chords all night and sing longingly about love and other contrived ideas, and often in doing so provide forgettable experience for all. Goodbye Twenty Nine however, fails to abide by the orthodox conventions. Whilst this – Max Shire’s second EP – has the usual raw emotion and angst associated with your everyday singer/songwriter, the way in which it is delivered singles it out to be something quite special.

On Goodbye Twenty Nine, Shire doesn’t simply share his emotions, he throws them at us. Displaying angst and anger in equal measure, through a musical form not normally displayed by your everyday solo artist. On his second outing he has the support of a band, allowing his music room to express itself through alternate tunings, abstract time signatures and a wide range of vocal styles, ranging from an eerie drone to the bawling of orders, the range summarised perfectly in opening track ‘Tomorrow My Servant’.

From a guitarist’s point of view the EP offers up a number of flashbacks to 90’s grunge era, with similarities to bands such as Nirvana. In particular ‘Strum’, which features the recurring and powerful strumming of the same 3 chords on the electric guitar during the verses, kicking in to a full-on onslaught of rock music towards the end, with a powerful bridge come solo that would fare well in comparison to the likes of Foo Fighters.

One of the main things on offer here though is the versatility of directions, Max Shire’s ability to mix the heavy with soft in a way only few artists manage sets him aside from the usual crowd. ‘Office Scum’, whilst still having a dark edge, provides us with an injection of energy from a slightly more upbeat guitar riff and quicker vocal rhythms, yet ends on what can only be described as the heavy cranking of a guitar. The structures could be compared to Radiohead, with the sheer unpredictability factor of what could be coming next.

‘TV Evangelist’ completes the spectrum. A delicate, slow-paced and soft anthem, provides it’s thrills through Max’s ability to unleash his vocal range, hitting high notes beside his usual dark tones, before finishing on yet another pounding conclusion that will leave onlookers with sore necks the following morning. The song is a keen example on how the production throughout the entirety of Max’s second EP allows the vocals to reach above the music, coming into their own in a similar fashion to how the likes Richard Ashcroft’s solo work hits our ears. The direction of the production seems all the more appropriate being as the production and mixing for the record was taken care of by Max himself, a measure taken due to harsh cash constraints.

Max Shire’s Goodbye Twenty Nine should not be ignored by any self appreciating rock fan. An artistic, articulate and downright interesting EP that will leave you hoping for more of the same when his debut album is released independently later this year.

The EP is available from www.sharpears.com, and with singles available to download on iTunes. - Counterfeit Magazine

Call me prejudiced, but it anyone describes their music as heavily influenced by Jeff Buckley I generally approach it with a certain amount of trepidation. Not because of a dislike for Jeff Buckley particularly, but being influenced by him tends to conjure the image of adolescent boys writing poetry in their bedrooms, wearing corduroy – no I am not speaking from experience (well maybe a bit).

Fortunately Max Shire seems to have managed to avoid the trap for young players that is aping every misunderstood teenager’s favourite pin-up, and instead has recorded a selection of quite delightful tracks. With more than a hint of Pavement, the record opens with title track ‘Love Lost Again’, with angular guitar work, there is a fair amount of wailing but not unnecessarily so.

Into the meat of the album, Max wears is heart on his sleeve singing through his teeth on ‘Some Girls’, and although earnest, there is substance there. ‘The Rebirth Visions’ is atmospheric and powerful whilst the tearing chorus of ‘Born.Unborn.Born Again’ breaks down and builds up to give an excellent climax to what is a promising debut.

By his own admission, he has hundreds of songs just waiting to be committed to record. The fact that this is a demo, in some ways quite remarkable; the production values are high and the majority of songs ready to be released to a wider audience. - Subba Cultcha

''He has a voice akin to Cobain and Buckley, with vast reach, an intrinsic tortured angst and an ability to make initially inaudible mumblings and sighs tell more of a story than words ever could.'' - www.themusicmagazine.co.uk

Jeff Buckley casts a long shadow over the music world, particularly over some of Britain's biggest names like Coldplay and Radiohead... and lesser known ones such as this. Released on no label, self-produced, mostly played by himself, Love Lost Again is a 36-minute trawl through what Max Shire has to offer to a record company – and that's certainly a lot.

As he says in his own miniature press release, Shire comes across like a slightly edgier Buckley, although not quite as gifted (not that this is an insult to him; few people are as gifted musicians as Buckley was), but complete with the melodic hooks often diverting into heavier alt-rock with minimal warning. The songwriting is consistently strong and varied, taking in chiming guitars, hard riffs and slow-burning heartbreakers.<>/p>

The restrained, New Order-ish drums and bass and passionate vocals of 'Some Girls' are a highlight, but none of the album can truly measure up the opening title track. Whilst being the most blatant Buckley-ish track – it sounds like a less epic 'Grace', sans strings – it is also the best track here, layers of percussion and guitars building up on top of each other to create a glorious, visceral wall of noise that never quite lets go by the end of its six minutes.

Aided considerably by its (probably necessitated) stripped-back production, Love Lost Again is a fantastic nine songs, and with Shire being responsible for virtually all of it you can only wonder what staggering material he could produce with a bigger budget and a label behind him. 5/5 - Rock Midgets

"Max Shire does not sound much like Jeff Buckley, and Love Lost Again does not sound like Grace. Yet they are similar in their ambition and focus and, moreover, in the desperation that both records hold close to their sound. 11/13” - Room Thirteen - Chris Daykin

''Young London songwriter Max Shire clearly draws a lot of things from Jeff Buckley and Radiohead -rawness, passion, angst and melody among them. By also allowing his own personality and ideas room to shine, he ensures that this debut is exciting rather than obvious...7/10” - Rock Sound Magazine

“Disregard your preconceptions of the phrase Singer-Songwriter as Max Shires alt-rock tunes will not fit that pigeon hole. "Goodbye Twenty Nine" does far more than act as a vehicle for Max's fine vocal delivery which has a big range and diversity of style and sits somewhere between Jeff Buckley with whom he has been compared, Thom Yorke and Matt Bellamy so, you get the idea, he's not half bad.11/13” - Emma Gould - Room Thirteen