Review: The Ventura Project

By Stephen Morris
Website contributor

Matthew is based in New York and Joey in Gloucestershire

The Ventura Project are singer/songwriter Jo from Gloucester, and Matt in New York - otherwise known as the bass player in Wheatus.

When citing influences on their MySpace page, most bands and artists will do pretty much what you'd expect.

They will list the bands and artists that they like, regularly listen to and with whom they share similarities (or like to plagiarise).

Occasionally you will get acts whose influences are a little more leftfield and seem to include crumpets, badminton rackets and the 525 bus service from Shurdington to Tewkesbury.

The Ventura Project occupy a middle ground. They list "dreams, Marvel comics, Lost, and the end of the world" as their influences.

They aren't necessarily being post-modern and obtuse. You can kind of see how Marvel comics might just have influenced them when they wrote a song called Heroes.

The Ventura Project use the idolisation of superheroes as a symbol for the desire for change and for something interesting to happen. Stephen Morris

Heroes covers much ground in its 3 minutes 32 seconds. It's all about feelings of detachment and difference from the rest of the world. It considers dreams of a better world, ambition and longing.

In short, it has the sort of subject matter reserved for teenage angst ridden Emo acts - without any of the screaming, whinging or general unpleasantness that you might expect from Funeral for a Dashboard Romance.

The song deals in the same kind of metaphors as the comics that inspire them.

Just as Spiderman is all about coming to terms with the scary world around you, so The Ventura Project use the idolisation of superheroes as a symbol for the desire for change and for something interesting to happen ("Do you ever think you are trapped in an ordinary world to which you don't belong?").

Musically, the band have a heavy synth basis and a love of calypso stylings.

It's a light and fluffy sound, teetering just on the right side of twee-ness. The song calls to mind the likes of Dubstar along with more recent artists like Lily Allen.

It would, perhaps, be better if the artificial trumpets could be replaced by the real thing, but necessity is often the mother of compromise, so I guess we might be able to let them off this time.

There is, apparently, a full album's worth of material coming our way from The Ventura Project. If Heroes is anything to go by, it will certainly be worth a listen or three.

In the meantime, we can satisfy ourselves in the knowledge that you don't have to be an Emo fan to be discontent with the world. The Ventura Project are here to help.