Marbled Eye : "Read the Air"

 

Here is a San Francisco post-punk band that carries plenty of tense jangles. They have a great guitar sound, that is warm and organic without paying an overt amount of homage to the classic sound of the genre. The main sticking point for me with these guys that they need to overcome with me lies in the vocals. The vocals are spoken and monotone. They begin to work around this on "Tonight", and while it is passable on the first two songs, not something I would want to return to. They make more of an attempt to sing on "Starting Over' but it never manages to string together enough actual notes to be considered a croon. It is not Ian Curtis worship either. Even more deadpan than Curtis. 

This one-trick pony tone of the vocals puts even more pressure on the guitars, which they deliver more often than not, but some moments are not as inspired. There is marginally more punk sentiment to "See It Too" that attempts to obscure the fact this guy might not be able to sing and is just an obligatory voice. It also begins to sound like just your run-of-the-mill garage rock by this song. On "All of the Pieces" the staccato guitars do more to balance things out and provide space for the vocals to do less. From there all the sounds begin to sound alike and it begins to become a wall of jangle that faces into the background. The same thing can happen with other genres of music like death metal where the vocals are just there to have a human layer, but aside from the lyrics being articulated because they are basically spoken, everything sounds too uniform. 

The last song is a little more downtrodden, but generally, the guitars are bright, so there is nothing all that dark about what they are doing here. If you think of a band like the Smiths, who used brighter guitar tones, they also had one of the best singers to balance this out.  These guys play their instruments well, but really it's the vocals that bored the hell out of me, perhaps that was the intent or perhaps that is the intent though the guy just can't sing, they might do better with an actual singer, even punk yelling might work better who knows as it is I will give this album a 6.5. 

pst30