| Changes A Cursive Memory Vagrant ***½ Do you remember the first time you had to write in cursive in the 4th the grade? And, how you couldn’t write a cursive “S” to save your life? Then, finally you were sure that you had all of that cursive nonsense down. You could write your name and it actually looked legible, so you went home to show your always approving mother. You handed her the paper all happy and excited. First she looks at the paper from a normal distance, then holds it out at arm’s length, tilts it to the side and holds it up real close. She looks down to you and gives you a nervous smile, “Great job honey.” She says, and even though you’re only 9 years old you know your cursive penmanship is still fucked and no one understands it at all. Well that’s the story of A Cursive Memory’s debut release, Changes. Changes is the first full length release from A Cursive Memory on Vagrant Records and is confusing to say the least. Should they stick to the piano-rock sound used on opening tracks, “South” and “Everything“? If they ditch the strings all together and stick to the keys they’d easily be dubbed the poor man’s Fray, but who wants to be mentioned in the same sentence as The Fray? It’s hard to know exactly who A Cursive Memory is. Are they just guilty of loving The Fray too much or did they write the handbook that The Fray follows? On songs like “Perfect Company” and “The Piano Song” it’s inconceivable that ACM is just “following” Frayed guidelines on how to write the perfect Piano song. Because after all it’s hard to read someone else’s cursive. |
| Blood in the Water Amino Self Released ** Looks are deceiving and at first glance at this self-released album jacket, one would expect a Neo “Hardcore” record to unfold. Hell, one could even expect a Christian “Hardcore” record with a title like Blood in the Water. It’s hard to fathom that the members of Animo are much fonder of bands like mid-nineties acts Lit and A Simple Plan rather than Underoath and Norma Jean. Blood in the Water is chalked full of 11 pop-punk ballads and anthems. The blueprint created by bands like Descendents is present with hooky power chord pop-punk songs and sing a long-y choruses except that the charisma that Descendents vocalist, Milo Aukerman possessed lives in Amino’s vocalist enough to land them on the radio a few times, but not convincingly enough to keep them there. We have all heard these songs before, heartbreak, loneliness, alienation, apathy and so on and so on. Bands like Green Day, Blink 182, Simple Plan and Sum 41 not to mention a billion others have been following this same Descendents blueprint for decades, and have gotten away with it. How? Because they have a certain passion and intensity. Blood in the Water just doesn’t have that extra ‘umpth’ that it needs. There is a half assed last hurrah on Blood in the Water’s final track “Out of Line“, letting us know exactly what they are capable of with an energetic three and a half minutes of pop punk-dom. Unfortunatly, Blood in the Water just falls flat and “Out of Line” comes a little too late. |
| Great White Whale Secret & Whisper Solid State **** Secret & Whisper understand the theory of musical dynamics. Dynamics is what makes music, well, dynamic. Without dynamics you get a cumbersome and redundant sound (I.E. your run of the mill Hardcore bands). The most prominent musical dynamic is the loud-soft dynamic, something that Kurt Cobian made popular but did not invent. It wasn’t even invented in this century. Regardless, the point is that no ‘new’ band today has made it work like Secret & Whisper does on their debut record, Great White Whale. S&W is not a hardcore band by any means even though they are on Solid State records, a label that usually harbors these types of creatures. Great White Whale could possibly fall be categorized as concept record. While Great White Whale is no Black Parade there is definitely a story to follow here. Or at least one we would like to hear to accompany the vocalist’s Charles Buskowski, haiku-styled lyrics. We’re hooked from opening track “Blonde Monster” throughout the record until the last track, the somber titled “Great White Whale”. Great White Whale just may be S&W’s equal to 30 Seconds to Mars’ A Beautiful Lie. Furney doesn’t snatch any licks from Jared Leto and his Mars crew. No more than Leto has snatched from everywhere else. There’s just one question here: what the hell is Secret & Whisper doing on Solid State Records? Solid State is lucky that Secret & Whisper didn’t become one of those buzz bands that labels fear, after the buzz, a bidding war ensues. We’ll see how long S&W stays on Solid State, don’t be surprised if these god-fearing lads move out of their small Solid State loft and into a more cushy condo-sized label. |
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