Band:
Gary Cherone – Vocals
Mark Cherone - Guitars
Joe Pessia - Bass, Mandolin
Dana Spellman – Drums, Percussion
Discography:
Debut
Guests:
Info
Produced by Gary Cherone, Joe Pessia.
Released 21/1-2011
Reviewed 12/1-2011
Links:
hurtsmile.com
myspace
frontiers
Musically it is rock or hardrock (whichever you prefer) of the more melodic side with a variation of songs from the heavier to the real (not power) ballads. It is a diverse album stylistically and as I have already stated earlier in this review: the singer can sound very much like Bob Dylan at times and that is not something I see as a positive as I hate Dylan’s singing and music. I must also state that the production is just what you can expect from music in this fashion, clean and very melodically focused.
I found this album being quite difficult to pinpoint on out seven graded ratings scale as I sometimes really liked what I heard and then at the other times I kind of hated it and figured it for absolute junk. So it was a bit difficult and took some time to arrive at a conclusion for this album but after finding that more tracks were boring than were good I found that a rating just below the middle would be fair.
I like the ballad songs on this album the most, they have a good feel to them and they are quite beautiful as well, Painter Paint and The Murder Of Daniel Faulkner (4699) feel like the best ones on the album. There are some half decent faster and heavier tracks as well, Set Me Free feels like the best example of this. Then there are some really poor tracks as well with the really bad Jesus Would You Meet Me as the outstanding example of that. That song is an illustration of how a really poor song by a rock band sounds and it really sucks, I skipped past that one often as I was listening to the record to review it.
The biggest fault of this record besides the vocals which I don’t like, is the uneven quality of the songs, ranging from really good to bloody awful and gives the record an incohesive feel to it. I tend not to like records that do not feel connected throughout, sometimes you even think it was made by different bands and that is never a good thing. So the spread of quality and sound to the songs is the main problem of this record.
To summarise I would say that this album feels really like a debut album by an inexperienced band, no more, no less.
HHHHHHH
