Morning After
Beneath The Real
7.4
Let's say you had these songs; pretty good ones. They are sort of heavy, but also kind of spooky poppish, like maybe Katatonia. Musically you had a confident style, and some relatively talented players, maybe not the tightest group on earth, but certainly up to the task at hand. All in all you had something decent to lay on the world at large.
What could you do to completely fuck up your project? Atrocious vocals! Sure enough, Morning After has taken the easy road to laughable badness. Now, sometimes a band will have a singer who can growl OK, but just fails miserably in the cleaner vocal department. But this guy is actually as bad at growling as he is at singing. I mean this guy is not a simple train wreck, he is a carpet bombing of the switchyard. Off key, off timed, bad cadence, wrong key, wrong language; this motherfucker has it all.
But the real pain here is that once again, a promising band is wrecked by the singer. The songs on the record are far from perfect, but they are interesting and well performed and they could be great. This is sort of a meloncholy-mixed-with-old-school metal sound; "Metalcholy". The guitarist is quite tasteful, and the drummer can fuck it up. The keys get a little tiresome, but don't they always? The arrangements move well. This could have been a goddamn good record. It's produced minimalistically, but that gives it a decent style for the most part.
But you can't get past the vocals.
Bottom Line: No, you shouldn't get this. It hurts to say it, with the music and the musical talent being so good, but if you can listen to this singer and not (a) crack up or (b) throw up, then you are far, FAR too stupid to be reading this. To the band: find another vocalist immediately and re-record this record. It really is the one thing between you and a good album. To everyone else: send in tapes of your vocals. Help these motherfuckers out. Someone do something about this. But don't buy it.
