True if Destroyed "s/t" CD
[Ed Walters]
Nine tracks of quirky, angular indie rock with a noisy edge and male/female vocal tradeoffs. The female singing takes the lead, but it's not smooth crooning or anything, for the most part it tends to be a monotone singing delivery with some almost spoken passages and a few areas of yelling, and the male vocals accent with some backup yells on occasion. Musically expect airy compositions driven by the rhythm section with looser guitar parts that are light on the distortion, scarcely smattered with keyboards (not my thing, thankfully they very rarely employ that device). This kind of stuff has never really been my thing, and while portions of the songwriting here are nice and energetic, and they mess with a lot of dynamics as far as melody and shifts in aggressiveness, I'm still just not feeling some of it. "Summer Screams" is a bit more energetic in drive and song structure, there's a nice memorability factor there. And "Failure by Fragmentation" uses piano and softer vocals for a much more emotionally dark composition that builds up very, very slowly over the course of four minutes, increasing in volume and getting ever so slightly busier as guitars come in full force. Very nice. Were all the songs so impactful I would definitely be into the disc as a whole. The recording needs a little work to really be effective in my opinion. The bass tone is nice and thick with a decent level of definition, and everything else tends to sound decent, but somehow the mix gets clouded. The vocals are a little loud, and the guitars can be overly dominant as well. It also gets muddy because of the way the vocals blend in with the bass tones. The percussion sort of falls to the distance but I really like the tones. Really it all sounds pretty decent, I don't mind the dry ruggedness that the overall aesthetic has in place, I just think tweaking the mix to balance things out would make a pretty significant difference. The vocals would definitely be a little more effective if they had some of the distance of the drums against the other instruments. The packaging consists of a matte gatefold digipack with a nice color scheme and line drawings of flowers, which continue across the matte black and white booklet along with the lyrics. The content deals with fairly open personal issues without getting too specific: "It's the cycle of do I dare that starts with substance and this starts the senses but I am not afraid, It's elevating us, Built merely for the thrill of falling haloed, I know..." In the end I just can't get into some of this. I'm a little torn. It looks good, it sounds okay, the writing's okay, but it's not doing so much for me. I definitely like a couple of the songs, and I think it's a fairly cohesive effort, but... hey, it's still not my thing. It happens. (5/10)
Running time - 30:29, Tracks: 9
[Notable tracks: Summer Screams, Failure by Fragmentation]
Ed Walters Records - http://www.edwaltersrecords.org

This review has been displayed 1476 times.