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The Life and Times - No One Loves You Like I Do

Rating

RIYL

Shiner
Cave In
Hum
Failure

Release Date

01/17/2012

Label

SlimStyle Records

Tracklist

1. Day Six
2. Day Nine
3. Day One
4. Day Five
5. Day Three
6. Day Eleven
7. Day Ten
8. Day Two
9. Day Twelve
10. Day Eight

Users Rating 3 ratings	Your Rating Create an account or log in to rate this album
Recent Ratings
danielwasilewski	Zach Roth
Rick Gebhardt

Look at the album’s title, now back here. Are you back yet? Alright, good. Think about that title. It sounds like the ultimate utterance of love and affection, and it certainly can be. However, over the album’s duration, the professions of love become a lot less lovely and more like a threat or a desperate attempt to keep a lover. The words “I love you” are found in almost every track, and with each successive declaration, the phrase becomes more hair-raising. Furthermore, only ten of the twelve days are represented in the telling of the story which makes the listener wonder, “What the hell happened on those days?” This is an album that embraces romantic obsession, of the healthy and screwed-up variety. Maybe this is the perfect album for all as a Valentine’s Day gift, after all.

Musically, the band embraces the ethereal genre of “space rock,” where post-rock, math rock, and shoegaze all meet up with elegant keyboard weirdness. The result is a sound that doesn’t quite live up to its potential. What aides the music and brooding lyrics is the disjointed narrative. Looking at the track list, one may assume that the ordering is an error, but the fact that the songs are arranged out of order helps the story unfold in a way that allows the listener to choose how he or she interprets the whole. At first glance, the story seems like a tale of unending, healthy love, but upon further listens, the real meaning behind the narrative starts to creep you the hell out. The music helps the story plod along, as the album sounds like it was recorded in space. The most obvious example of this is the muddled vocals, which sound slightly “off” throughout, as if vocalist Allen Epley recorded the album while intoxicated. His vocals punctuate the album’s highs and lows. For example, the crescendo at the end of “Day One” (which is oddly track number three) finds the instruments at full-volume, but Epley’s vocals pierce through the noise to proclaim, “I love you forever. Soon we’ll be together.” The emotion behind that moment speaks to why the album’s track placement is so well thought out. That ending would sound quite beautiful if it were in fact the first song on the album. However, as the listener has already been through two brooding tracks, the moment serves to recall a moment in time when the narrator’s love was healthy, which is far from the actual truth. The thought that went behind the song placement and pacing of the album shows the care that The Life and Times took when crafting No One Loves You Like I Do.

The problem with the album is that while each song fits well within the narrative, not every song is an exercise in interesting music up to par with “Day One” or “Day Six.” Tracks like “Day Five” and “Day Ten” seem to wander nowhere in particular, and showcase that the overall musical execution is not quite up to par with the band’s storytelling attributes. Overall, this is a highly enjoyable space rock album that many will be able to enjoy, but The Life and Times has not written a perfect album yet. Also, the phrase “no one loves you like I do” may be tainted forever now.

--Nick Senior