Rivals Reviews
Rivals is quite charming and, at only an hour or two long, doesn’t wear out its welcome. If Return of the Obra Dinn is the chart-topping hit of this growing little genre, Rivals is the local garage band album that gets a glowing write-up in the alt-weekly: small, messy, lovable. Rivals is seemingly built with one audience in mind: older weirdos like me who don’t mind a little more Wilco-style music in their detective games.
I’m just far less interested in “two dudes who are creative musical forces have a falling out and weirdly obsess over each other for years” than I am seeing the semi-incestuous manoeuvrings of guitarists between different bands in one big music scene, as in Family. I feel like the relationship in Rivals is one that I have seen versions of a lot already, and one that gets talked about loads in real life all the time. The perpetual cycle of John and Paul.