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Codeseven "Dancing Echoes/Dead Sounds" CD
[Equal Vision]
After a brief and unnecessary ambient intro ("La Mčmoire Rčincarnče"), the first actual track, "All the Best Dreams", opens the disc with a glowing error that misrepresents the rest of what's to follow: A fairly wimpy, uneventful, laidback composition with softly sung vocals, annoying little guitar effects, and horrible dashes of hipster keyboards that really make me want to stab my ears off. The chorus is really good (of course), but god damn those keyboards, and the rest of the song blows ass. Not at all what I had expected, and thankfully the rest of the disc is much better. Don't get me wrong, it's all very chilled out and relaxed, but the songwriting is far more creative and memorable elsewhere, so "All the Best Dreams" is not only a terrible opener, it honestly shouldn't be on the damn record at all. "Pathetic Justice" is driven by sparse piano and synths with solid percussion and lots of layered vocal work, "Nasty Little Revolution" brings in droning guitar lines and uses a lot of percussive manipulation to make the drums sound more like a blend of live and programmed rhythms (very effectively, I might add), "Roped and Tied" gets off to a rocky start and falters a few times start but is largely held up by a really effective chorus that's a little catchier than a lot of this stuff gets, and "Sunflower" closes with a slowly pulsing chord progression before dropping out to a very quiet lull that comes back and forth throughout the gradually paced piece. There are three brief little ambient segues spread throughout the disc as well, which I see no use in at all, so there is some clutter that needs cleaning here. I have no real quarrels with the recording other than the fact that it can be a little bit jumbled with density since there's so much layering. The percussion sounds fucking brilliant across the board and the singing is immensely lush, which is gorgeous, but the basslines really lose their character in all the depth, and some of the more tangle guitar riffs can feel somewhat flat amidst it all as well. Vocals and drums almost seem to be the dominant factors most of the time, but I'm not too bothered by that because there's a lot of experimentation going on in the mix with tons of obscured layers and little details thickening things up. The layout is somewhat minimal but very consistent in its use of faint cityscapes and strangely dark, ethereal images of clouds and skylines, with the lyrics in tiny type across a flat black background. The lyrics are personal but not generic, usually sticking with fairly abstract concepts and interesting word play that flows well. "Never mind the killing I'm making, Never mind the mistakes I've made, I never said that the killing was easy, Or how to dig a grave, Cauterize caught her eyes, With a blank expression from across the room, I'm a mess, I confess that I'm already wasted..." Sans a few hiccups this is a really promising record. I think they ought to work with spicing up the energy levels a little more here and there, either by speeding up the tempos a little or maybe using some louder dynamics for more emphasis on occasion, but at its best there's some really somber, flowing material here. And it's not something that can be easily categorized, which is cool (despite the fact that it's not something groundbreaking either). I'm not blown away by this, and I'm actually actively angry that they kick off the record with a terrible, terrible song (none of the other songs are classifiable as "bad"), but there's something interesting here. There are a few too many dull moments for me to really appreciate the disc in its entirety, but its finer points make me curious about their future work. (6/10)
Running time - 41:11, Tracks: 12
[Notable tracks: Pathetic Justice, Roped and Tied, Alt. Wav]
Equal Vision Records - http://www.equalvision.com
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