Late For The Sky
In Plain Sight
2.4
I’ll go ahead and get this all out of the way right off the bat. Late For The Sky is not a metal band and besides an aggressive moment here and there, they really aren’t heavy at all. Beyond that, the band’s breed of nu-tinged rock is dated and honestly probably wouldn’t have done that well when people actually listened to this style. On with the review…
Having come together after the demise of Boston act RUMBLE Syndicate, Late For The Sky play commercial rock with a slightly hard edge that will appeal to fans of modern radio acts like Breaking Benjamin, Trapt, and the like. As with most bands of this style, a majority of the material on In Plain Sight is merely beefed up late 90’s-styled alternative, complete with bland power-chord driven riffing, slightly aggressive vocals, and some truly awful angsty nonsense for lyrics.
The songwriting herein gets pretty formulaic after a few songs and quickly becomes very predictable. Nearly every song has an intro, a groovy (sometimes hip-hop-ish) verse, a power-chord driven chorus, and a bridge that either attempts heaviness or wanders off into some lame introspective crap. “Someone Said Something” starts with a wah-peddle funkified riff before plummeting into a chunky nu-style riff and the brilliantly penned chorus where D2e croons “someone said something to somebody somewhere.”
There really isn’t anything positive to say about In Plain Sight. I mean, the singer goes by D2e (pronounced as Double E) for crying out loud. Had this come out in 1998 alongside Staind and whatever else was hugely popular back then, these guys probably would have been written off as a second or third tier hard rock band. Now that this style has been grating on the nerves for almost a decade… well you get the idea. Sounding dated isn’t a terrible thing if you can pull it off, but unfortunately, Late for the Sky aren’t going to be the catalyst to a nu-rock revival.
