Cody are a Manchester band whose members joined fresh from the wreckage of various previous musical ventures. Their collaborative musical efforts are all soundscapes and atmospherics, a soaring epic sound full of chiming effects and imbued with a sense of breathlessness. Based on noise rather than melody, it’s vocal heavy with the singer’s voice always standing out from the experimental sweeping of sound behind him.

Cody clearly have their own sound and a strong sense of band identity, but it’s not one that works for me. Their demo is very clever and well thought out, with the sound embodying the emotion well and lots of impressive effects and crashing noises… and all this adds up to something which I just found kinda irritating. The music is loud without having much impact, innovative without the wow factor and emotional without inspiring any emotion in the listener. Cody somehow seem to cancel themselves out, to make a lot of impressive ingredients add up to nothing. I’m a big fan of soundscapes, noise effects and emotion, but Cody embody all those ingredients and still jarred horribly upon my ear. For the first few minutes of playing they did inspire a sense of benign interest, but it wasn’t long before I simply wanted them to go away. It all felt a bit too self-consciously heartfelt, a bit too formulaically innovative, and it simply grated across my nerves. Cody are clearly aiming for a certain passion in their sound, but they never quite click into gear. And so they end up coming across as somewhat artificial and contrived, which created a bit of an insurmountable barrier to my enjoying to their demo.