This is the debut album from UK rock band Oversize.
Oversize play a mix of alternative rock, post-hardcore, grunge, and shoegaze, and Vital Signs delivers 32 minutes of their personable brand of music. This album takes me back many, many years, yet still offers something worth paying attention to in 2025.
Oversize’s music is a mix atmosphere, emotion, and subtle hooks. The songs build presence easily and quickly, accomplishing in a handful of minutes what most ostensibly similar acts try to do in double that. This brevity of delivery works for the band, and the songs are more impactful because of this.
There’s an intriguing combination of bright hopefulness and melancholic acceptance that infuses Vital Signs. There is beauty here, but also grief, and Oversize do well to navigate the two with skill, moving between them concurrently. The approach is well-judged, allowing for songs that are dark enough to have real substance, but also colourful enough to offset this with immersive atmosphere. Occasionally an aggressive side rears its head, offering an outlet for pent up feelings, but this is a rare exception rather than the norm.
Stylistically, Deftones, Smashing Pumpkins, Compulsion, Far, and Rival Schools are all appropriate reference points. There is a definite 90s feel to the material, although Oversize deliver it with a contemporary vision that sees them fit nicely alongside acts such as Sugar Horse, Holy Fawn, and Slow Crush, for example.
This is a good debut album from Oversize. It’s an record that’s best digested at length, absorbing its nuances over time as the music slowly crawls under your skin.
Highly recommended for fans of the 90s as seen through a modern lens.
Wonderbox Metal 