Letting Up Despite Great Faults - Letting Up Despite Great Faults

Genre indie Publisher Unsigned

A cacophony of sound awaits you on the album Letting Up Despite Great Faults. The album follows a post modern trend of trying to use every sound imaginable in music (mostly through electronics) to try and create that warm and colorful feeling the original psychedelic bands.

For me, every song starts with one thing. Vocals. It's kind of ironic, considering it’s usually the last thing that gets done during production of an album. The bottom line is, if I (or someone else) doesn’t like the vocals, the most present part of the song usually, the music is going to fall flat on its face. This rule (that some call “idiotic”) is what keeps me from truly enjoying a lot of music I’d probably otherwise enjoy. That’s not exactly the case here, but the vocals do not help. Truth be told, there are times that you can barely hear his voice due to over modulation. For the most part, the vocal performance is flat, lifeless, and ultimately tiresome.

Despite the vocals, there is a lot of music on here that is quite soothing. The problem is, it is usually tempered by a crappy electronic beat or even worse, what sounds like a xylophone. Don’t misunderstand me, I think every musical instrument has a place, even one that is sold as a children’s toy all over the world, however here isn’t the place for it, in my opinion. It adds color, but it just sounds dumb to me.

I probably sound like an old codger when I say this, but I remember when my psychedelic music had more “music” in it. Once again, that’s not to say there is nothing musical about it. On the contrary, it’s all very musical. But the fact of the matter is that the electronic part of it completely shatters and overshadows any and all redeeming musical value in my eyes. As I said, previously, the most annoying is the drum sampling. I just don’t understand why you would take a great guitar arpeggio or chord progression and then muck it up with an overbearing electronic drum that sounds pretty much in contrast to it. The music (and by that I mean the instrumentation) has all of this potential for life and most of it is thoroughly squashed out.

There is a song that actually kind of got my ire up. “Pause”, the second I heard it, I thought of Coldplay. I’m not saying it’s a rip off (but considering what they did to Joe Satriani, that would be ironic wouldn’t it?) but it has this semi-epic feel that Coldplay have in a lot of their big singles via “texture."

In the end, this is just another band in the long line of many who are producing sterile and lifeless pseudo psychedelic music. Harsh words, I know, but that’s what I hear. When I listen to this music, while I do get the sense of some color, there is nothing fresh or vibrant. It’s all very produced, and to me, sounds very fake.