Sound The Alarm - Stay Inside
Rating
RIYL
The Academy Is…Relient K
Foo Fighters
Tracklist
1. Closer2. Picture Perfect
3. Suffocating
4. Stay Inside
5. Until We Collide
6. Fact or Fiction
7. Telling Lies
8. I Told You
9. Count On Me
10. Something New
11. Blame It All On Me
12. Fight For…
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Have you ever been walking past a cake shop and seen a particularly delightful treat laid out in the window, all covered in colourful icing and looking so appealing you just have to go in the store and buy it? And you get out after buying it, sink your teeth into it and... nothing. No flavour, none of the lovely cakey goodness it promised to provide from its mouth watering exterior, just a bland, but nice looking, every day cake.
Take away the colourful icing from Sound The Alarm’s newest effort, taking shape in the form of crisp production, good knowledge of pop rock song structures and above average playing ability, and all you’re left with is a feeling of unfulfillment and a rather mundane record. It says a lot that a rather forced use of metaphor needs to be employed when reviewing this disc. It’s not to say that Stay Inside is a bad album, or that there are any points over its duration where you will be throwing your stereo out the window, but there really is a lack of substance to almost all of the twelve tracks. Reaching the end of the album is actually quite a chore; not because it’s particularly terrible, but the songs offer very little in the way of motivation to continue listening after the fourth or fifth track.
“Picture Perfect” is really the only saving grace of the album as a whole. Whilst all the tracks operate around a similar structure of simply working up to a big chorus, “Picture Perfect” is the only song that comes close to memorable. Its keyboard hook is really quite catchy, and the lack of songs on par simply prompt a return to this track long before the end is reached.
It’s a stretch to think this record will do much. There are simply too many bands doing this type of music a whole lot better. But on the other hand, with a label push behind a single, “Picture Perfect” the obvious choice, they could be huge. Because let’s face it, when has mediocrity ever stood in the way of a band’s rise to stardom?
--Alex Davies
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Leeds, England