So, Funeral For A Friend have decided to go independent after three mega-selling major label albums. The “Waterfront Dance Club” single is our chance to experience their “newly invigorated sound”, so the press release tells me. Perhaps they’ve done a Beatles? All that time in the Far East… perhaps they’ve discovered Taoist gamelan orchestras and have decided to embark on an exploration of microtone scales and Mongolion throat-singing?
In a word, no. What you get is the same competent but uninspired radio-friendly emo-by-numbers that has made Funeral For A Friend the darlings of MySpace. Reviewing stuff like this is a nightmare, because there’s so little to say of interest… how about “if Don Henley was still cranking out pop songs in the current musical climate, they’d sound like this?”
The big difference being that Don Henley’s “Boys Of Summer” is still a memorable tune to this day, and I really can’t see “Waterfront Dance Club” being looked back upon in decades to come as the defining sound of an epoch. Funeral For A Friend don’t define a sound, they conform to it; the stuff that gets remembered is the stuff that stands out rather than blends in, and there’s a hundred and one bands cranking out metal-lite to exactly this same formula – albeit not with the same profile or sales figures.
“Waterfront Dance Club” isn’t terrible, but it’s incredibly formulaic: digitally polished Pro-Tools production glosses rocky chords and clean bright lead guitar while vocalist Matt Davies plays the ambiguous nostalgia card with some soaring vocals about some nameless disco somewhere. It’s mid-paced to the point of being pedestrian; it has nothing new to say, nor a new way of saying something timeless. The most distinctive thing about Funeral For A Friend is Davies’ distinctive Welsh accent, which at least sets them slightly aside from the hordes of nasal Californians treading the same path.
“Beneath The Burning Tree” sits in the same corral; simple chord progression, verse/chorus structure, big epic middle section, rinse and repeat. It’s pop music, pure and simple, and on that level at least it has more merit than some of the novelty tracks that populate the charts. But I really struggle with the idea of anyone over twenty-one finding anything even remotely exciting about Funeral For A Friend. They’re like a primer, an ABC of rock music, an introduction to the format… a gateway drug, at best. hopefully the hordes of kids who’ll snap up these singles will go on to investigate the deeper layers of music as they get older; if so, then Funeral For A Friend have done something worthwhile.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Beneath The Burning Tree, emo, Funeral For A Friend, metal, pop, rock, Waterfront Dance Club
