Time passes each day. Our hearts break and heal. It rains, then it rains again, and then (in Michigan, anyway) it snows. You say goodbye to who you were. You say goodbye to someone you loved. Time passes.<\/p>\n
All is not bleak, of course. Life for many of us is full of happiness, warmth, comfort and love. But those spaces of gray, of longing and melancholy, always fill in the yellow and red. They have to. Alias <\/i>captures those spaces in both lyric and melody, resulting in a lovely, overlong and downbeat disc that is one of the quartet\u2019s finest efforts, if quite different from their previous outings.<\/p>\n
The band is comprised of two sets of siblings and three of them (the women and frontman Romeo Stodard) share vocals and natural harmonies. This familial approach, and the tone and approach of the band\u2019s music, has earned them comparisons to Fleetwood Mac. The music is mostly modern indie-pop-rock shoegaze with hints of \u201870s pop and \u201890s grunge, an appealing combination, and the vocal harmonies soar with melancholy beauty and save several songs that are otherwise fairly standard and too long.<\/p>\n
A pair of six-minute songs open the disc \u2013 what better way to announce a clean break from the sunny past and the concerns of youth? \u2013 in \u201cWake Up\u201d and \u201cYou K(no)w.\u201d The former begins as a piano ballad, taking its time through the verses before exploding in a sea of voices and noise in the chorus, which then leads to an orchestral buildup of voices piling on one in a crescendo, ending in a single feminine wail and then some piano to end the piece. <\/p>\n
\u201cYou K(no)w\u201d confidently slogs through its sections of gray, putting a rain-soaked sheen on its rather pedestrian lyrics, though a highlight (of the disc, really) is Stodard\u2019s nimble voice, which is capable of cinematic grandeur, melancholy tones and higher pop-tinted vocals. \u201cShot In The Dark\u201d cranks up the guitars to post-grunge levels, leveling off for the verses and then closing with a great solo straight off a \u201890s Neil Young album. \u201cRoy Orbison\u201d uses the titular artist as a touchstone for the echo-heavy song, and it doesn\u2019t quite cohere, it\u2019s clear that Orbison was an influence on this band\u2019s sound.<\/p>\n
Had this disc been full of these slower moments, it wouldn\u2019t be nearly as good, but the band wisely incorporates rock elements (like \u201cShot In The Dark\u201d) and pop elements as backdrops for the brooding lyrics. The middle of the disc abruptly shifts to two pop songs, the disco-infused \u201cE.N.D.\u201d (which is too distracting to really hit as a great song, although the bassline is sublime) and the truly excellent \u201cThought I Wasn\u2019t Ready,\u201d which brings to mind Fleetwood Mac and \u201870s singer-songwriters like Carole King and Carly Simon (Angela Gannon takes lead on this one).<\/p>\n
\u201cAccidental Song\u201d floats by without much impact but \u201cBetter Than You\u201d is a good indie pop song, making way for the six-minute \u201cEnough,\u201d which brings those Young comparisons back (this band opened for him on a recent tour, so perhaps they learned by osmosis) with a deliberate grunge rock approach that closes with a good band jam. It would have been a good way to end things, but that honor goes to \u201cBlack Rose,\u201d which simply repeats the slower, more melancholy, dirge-like themes to lesser effect, even if Angela and Michele Stodard\u2019s voices are lovely.<\/p>\n
There is hope to be found among the disappointment and longing here, a sure sign of the band members reaching their thirties and growing up. Had some editing been done here for song length and perhaps a couple of duff tracks, this would have been a moody masterpiece, but as such, it is a flawed, beautifully sung and diverse record that speaks to all of us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":32166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[9518],"rating":[5615],"class_list":["post-43917","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-the-magic-numbers","rating-rating-b"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/45"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/43917\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=43917"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=43917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}