Pulse05
Sponsored by 710 BookStore - - - http://www.seventen.com/CD Review: Matchbook Romance - "Voices"
Julie Engler
CD Review
Release date: Feb. 14, Epitaph Records
Rating: 3/5
Thanks to their new release, "Voices," Matchbook Romance does not exactly fall into the category of emo, nor do their heavier riffs and somewhat screaming vocals automatically place them in "screamo."
While the lyrics are rather typical of the average emo band, the music takes the band to a whole new playing field, begging the listeners to figure out for themselves where they belong. This release takes the band to a whole new level by breaking apart from what was recorded before.
This time, Matchbook Romance has promised a better album, and while it is indeed better, there is still a little room for improvement. Slow, emotional ballads are nice, but being depressed and heartbroken all the time is not quite as fashionable as it once was a couple of years ago, when emo music was hitting the streets in full force.
The whole album has an incredibly creepy and mysterious tone to it. There are only a select handful of songs that are relatively fast, mainly loaded at the top of the track list. One of them is "Monsters," which was selected as the first single of the album.
After passing the first half of songs, the more aggressive of the bunch, the rest begin to taper off and become a little less interesting, starting with "Say It Like You Mean It." Here, the music is almost as tedious as being stranded on a fair ride that is stuck in mid-air for what seems like an eternity. Skipping ahead to "Fiction" might be a good idea.
A lot of the songs are melodic and heavy and fluctuate between being drowsy and rapid in tempo. The rhythm also moved away from the traditional pop beat to more of a progressive hardcore mixture that is almost random in structure. But it is definitely an honor to say that the music is seeping with the avoidance of the almost expected radio-formatted sound. It's newer and fresher.
They give us a little treat at the end of the last track, a secret song somewhere around the 11-minute marker. It's an acoustic song, and I don't want to spoil it so I'll just leave it at that, expect to say it is a little predictable but still lovely.
One thing that could have made the album better was if they fed off the energy they started with. Slow songs are OK, but it's nice to be able to not mope around about failed relationships all day. Matchbook Romance proves they can do better with this CD, so let's hope their next release shows it.
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